“I hope all the reasons I’ve given here help explain why I’m so late to this party,” Larson writes. “But I’m finally here. And I could use a drink.”
The Far Side became a cultural phenomenon after it appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 1, 1980, reported The New York Times. The single-panel comic, which ran until Larson, now 69, retired in 1995, featured men, women, children, animals and insects in often offbeat and sometimes inscrutable situations. One installment, “Cow Tools,” featured a bovine in front of a worktable with an odd assortment of implements. The image was described on Reddit as the comic’s most “notoriously confusing cartoon.” There were also occasional controversies: A chimp once described Jane Goodall as a tramp, though she later wrote the foreword for a collected edition of the series. One scientist even named an insect after Larson.
