Thursday, March 12, 1970

Author - Larson, Gary

Birth: August 14, 1950.

Death: Still alive and viewing the world from a twisted angle.

Comments: Gary Larson is a cartoonist famous for producing the bizarrely wonderful single panel comic strip The Far Side which ran from 1980 to 1995. Before turning to cartooning as a profession, Larson graduated from Washington State University with a B.A. in communications. His original plan to write commercials was quickly discarded, as was a brief stint in a jazz band. Finding himself working in a music store at a job he hated, Larson turned to cartooning as an option, getting his first cartoons published on an irregular basis starting in 1976. Larson's first regular strip was the short lived Nature's Way that ran in the Seattle Times in 1979. The Seattle Times dropped Nature's Way at about the same time that the San Francisco Chronicle picked up The Far Side, and Larson worked on the new strip for the next fifteen years. Larson credits his older brother Dan with honing his paranoid sense of humor by playing several tricks on him when they were kids, as well as helping develop Larson's love of science and herpetology. Sadly, Dan died of cancer in 1991.

He won the Rueben Award twice: Once in 1990 and again in 1994. Larson has a website dedicated to The Far Side. He has politely asked people not to reproduce his strips on the internet, so don't.



My reviews of Gary Larson's books:
The Far Side Gallery 3
The Far Side Gallery 4
Last Chapter and Worse

Other books by Gary Larson that I have read but not reviewed:
The Chickens Are Restless
Cows of Our Planet
The Far Side Gallery
The Far Side Gallery 5
The PreHistory of the Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit
Unnatural Selections
Wiener Dog Art

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