Happy birthday, Gary Larson
I previously noted the birthdays of Calvin & Hobbes comic strip creator Bill Watterson and Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau.
Therefore, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to wish a happy 57th birthday to Gary Larson, creator of the late, great comic panel, The Far Side.
Several years ago, Salon’s Susan McCarthy wrote a splendid profile of this reclusive genius. Here’s the top of the story:
When Gary Larson started out as a cartoonist, he didn’t know what white-out was. Any time he made a mistake, he threw the drawing out and began again. This is like a film director not knowing about yelling “Cut!” or like a painter not knowing about turpentine or like a road crew not knowing about jackhammers. There must have been a Great Moment when someone happened to mention the uses of white-out in Larson’s presence, a moment so great that only Larson could draw it.
Elizabeth Weise of USA Today wrote last fall:
After college in the early 1970s he and a friend started a band named Tom and Gary, which friends immediately dubbed “two guys as exciting as their names.” Tom on the trombone. Gary on banjo.
…”I came up with a rendition of In-a-Gadda-da-Vida. (Hey, someone had to try.) I’m afraid it was largely unrecognizable. I think I had better success with Eleanor Rigby, but my hunch is people still preferred the original.”
But Larson eventually had to make a living. He went to work as a cruelty investigator for the Humane Society. The Salon story reports, however:
Driving to the interview for the Humane Society job, Larson reports, a dog pack ran across the road and he hit one of them.
The dog survived. And so, apparently, did Gary Larson. The Salon story again:
Out of the blue, the fed-up Larson sat down one day in 1976 and drew six cartoons, which he submitted to a local magazine, Pacific Search. They bought them for $90, and Larson was thrilled by the easy money. Next, a weekly paper, the Sumner News Review, paid him a lavish $3 a pop for a weekly cartoon. It wasn’t until 1979 that he persuaded the Seattle Times to give him a weekly panel, “Nature’s Way.”
The Times placed “Nature’s Way” next to its “Junior Jumble,” which may have increased the number of readers who complained that the humor was sick and twisted and not in a nice way.
In 1979 Larson got the idea of doubling his cartooning income (he was back up to $15 each) by getting a second newspaper to publish his panels. He fixed his sights on the San Francisco Chronicle and drove down to San Francisco. After a week of waiting to be seen, of turning over his portfolio, calling in twice a day to ask if anyone had looked at it and being openly pitied by receptionists, Larson was told, to his astonishment, that the Chronicle wanted to syndicate his cartoon, retitled “The Far Side,” and offer it to about 30 newspapers across the country. And forget this weekly business — they wanted one a day.
When the dazed Larson returned home, he found a letter from the Seattle Times — it was dropping the cartoon. Too many complaints. Too offensive. If he hadn’t already lined up the Chronicle job, Larson says, he would have given up cartooning then.
Eventually, of course, The Far Side was picked up by 1,900 newspapers around the world.
And then, 12 years ago, Larson quit. The Far Side ended. It lives today in about umpteen-billion reprint books and cartoon-a-day desk calendars that folks seem to never tire of buying.
In fact, Larson grew concerned about those desk calendars. He told USA Today last fall:
“The daily calendar seemed, to me, like a kind of cartoon black hole, and you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that that couldn’t be sustained indefinitely. That’s why I pulled the plug on that one after the ‘02 edition. Kind of a preemptive strike,” he says.
But in early 2006 his publisher Andrews McMeel approached him about doing another one, and Larson had an idea.
For many years Larson — along with a good number of the scientists he so lovingly lampooned — have become increasingly concerned about the environment. On a diving trip in the Galapagos a decade ago, he met someone who worked with an international non-profit group called Conservation International. He liked what he heard and become a donor.
Now he wanted to do something bigger. When his publisher McMeel called, “I knew I had to open my mouth and say something,” he says.
So Larson’s share of this year’s Far Side desk calendar — USA Today put that take at about $2 million — went to Conservation International. Weise quoted Larson as saying:
“At least (the calendar) can die on the vine for a good cause,” he says.
Read the Salon profile here.
Read the USA Today story here.
Find The Far Side web page here.
Gary shares a birthday with former basketball star Magic Johnson, actress Halle Berry, author Danielle Steele, comedian Steve Martin and Pultizer-prize-winning journalist Russell Baker. In addition, today is National Creamsicle Day. Seriously.
Gary, wherever you are: Best wishes. But please come back to newspapers soon. We sure miss you.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:37 am
I always loved Far Side. My mom never got it. It became my litmus test for people I got along with — did you “get” Far Side, or not?
My best friend bought me a Far Side mug one time, and it was absolutely perfect for me: A forlorn kid who can’t get into the gifted school, pushing with all his might against the door, which won’t budge — and he’s totally missing the sign that says “Pull.”