Then came The Far Side. It was confidently modern and confidently weird. Within its single panel, its contents were entirely unpredictable: it had no recurring characters, no ongoing narrative other than life on earth. It could depict anyone or anything, and Larson seemed to take it all in, from office worker to water buffalo, chimpanzee to psychiatrist, Martian to snail. Its specificity alone, on the comics page, felt radical. So did its attention to the natural world. Well, this may not be wise on a first date, but I just gotta try your garlic wharf rats, a snake says in one cartoon, looking psyched. In another, called Fly whimsy, a fly, hovering over a picnic, says to a friend, Wait a second, Leonard . . . I just wanna go down there, land on that potato salad, and take off again. Squid children bickered over keeping tentacles to themselves; dinosaurs smoked cigarettes and went extinct. In a time when nerd culture was in its infancy, The Far Side rewarded the reader for knowing something about opposable thumbs, Moby-Dick, Lewis and Clark, or the workings of a proboscis. But it also rewarded a love of the lowbrow more than one cartoon featured birds seeing human targets below.
I own several cherished books of Far Side cartoons. One my very favorites: A nerdy cowboy with thick glasses crouches behind a covered wagon next to a grizzled old timer, with an arrow through his hat. Several burning arrows protrude from the wagon. “Hey!” the nerdy cowboy shouts. “They’re lighting their arrows! Can they *do* that?” In this single panel, we get a profound insight into law and life.
