25 years after the end of his syndicated gag panel strip “The Far Side,” cartoonist Gary Larson, 69, has started posting “new stuff” on his recently launched website. “I don’t want to mislead anyone here,” he writes, “this corner of the website — ‘New Stuff’ — is not a resurrection of ‘The Far Side’ daily cartoons. (Well, not exactly, anyway—like the proverbial tiger and its stripes, I’m pretty much stuck with my sense of humor. Aren’t we all?)”
Larson elaborated he always intended to return to cartooning, but that a “clogged pen” always scuppered those plans, particularly when he’d design personal Christmas cards. That was, until a few years ago, when “I decided to try a digital tablet. I knew nothing about these devices but hoped it would just get me through my annual Christmas card ordeal. I got one, fired it up, and lo and behold, something totally unexpected happened: within moments, I was having fun drawing again. I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered, all the creative potential it contained. I simply had no idea how far these things had evolved. Perhaps fittingly, the first thing I drew was a caveman.”
Launched on December 31, 1979, “The Far Side” was a series of single gag panels depicting surreal situations, often involving anthropomorphic animals. Before Larson retired with the final cartoon on January 1, 1995, the comic was carried by over 1900 daily newspapers, translated into 17 languages, and collected into calendars, greeting cards, and 23 compilation books. While the comic won awards, it would also attract letters from confused/angry readers — at one point, Larson had to issue a press release explaining one particularly mysterious cartoon from 1982, “Cow Tools.”
You can check out Larson’s new digital “stuff” here. He concludes his message to fans saying, “I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got this cool gizmo, and I’ve got no deadlines. And — to borrow from Sherlock Holmes — the game is afoot. Again, please remember, I’m just exploring, experimenting, and trying stuff. New Stuff. I have just one last thing to say before I go: thank you, clogged pen.”
