You’ve probably already come across Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, they’re popular designs for
greeting cards and calendars among other things. Those little one panel gags, just like all the others you’ll find on the shelves at Clinton’s and Birthdays except that they actually are funny, and involve considerably more wit and considerably less boobies and farting.
Then again, let’s just assume for a moment that you’ve never been inside a greeting card shop; you were an orphan child taken in by a friendly clan of sewer
rats and raised by them as one of their own, sewer rats don’t go in so much for special occasions, except for funerals that combine the burial with the buffet. But you’re a well educated little rodent, you go through school, college, university, however you choose to waste the first and most valuable quarter of your life. Odds are that at least one of your teachers will have had a noticeboard with various cartoons, quotes, funky little pieces of writing and
stuff like that, Gary Larson grows on school noticeboards like fungus, he’s the main reason I didn’t drop out and join a street gang.
You can usually recognise which
cartoons are his, apart from his
signature style of drawing (akin to the signature style of a panda with diarrhoea squatting over a painting canvas, but he makes it work) he’s got a rather unique
kind of humour, twisted and bizarre but still kind of innocent. Makes use of a lot of wide known biology and science, he seems particularly fond of putting animals in human situations, like the praying mantis woman accusing another of having an affair with her mate and being told “Surely you know that I would only eat my own husband”, or the cow with a bib and knife and fork sitting behind a big pile of steaks proclaiming to the herd that they tasted a bit like chicken. Gorgeous surreal stuff, if you like it you’ll love it.
More reviews about the The Far Side