FOR A MONDAY NIGHT, IT WAS A good crowd: 1,800 people of every age had shelled out as much as $14 a ticket for a lecture and slide show at UCLA. The star attraction was a man rarely seen in public forums — Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, now syndicated daily in more than 600 newspapers worldwide.
One enthusiastic ticket-holder, a bearded man who looked to be in his early 30s, was carrying a stack of Larson titles, including Bride of the Far Side, Valley of the Far Side, It Came From the Far Side and The Far Side Gallery. “I intend to get every one of these rascals autographed,” he told a friend.
“Larson’s so great,” he continued. “He takes me to another level, puts me in some other place. You know, it’s kind of like music … like jazz. Gary Larson draws jazz.”
I smiled and let that comment roll to the back of my head. Remembering Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, composers who play by their own rules, and with delightfully eccentric results, I thought I knew what he meant. Hmmm, Larson draws jazz …
Larson’s appearance had also attracted a crew from ABC’s 20/20. On hand, too, was Vicky Houston, publicist for Larson at Universal Press Syndicate. “They make him nervous,” Houston said, referring to journalists like me. “Gary doesn’t even like giving interviews. But, face it, when you’ve got three books simultaneously on The New York Times best-seller list, it isn’t exactly easy to hide.”
The theme for the night was “Laughter in the ’80s,” with an introductory talk by Joseph Boskin, professor of history at Boston University and author of Humor and Social Change in 20th Century America. I couldn’t have been the only one in the audience that night more eager to laugh with Larson rather than to learn about the humorous aspects of “scarcity and shared resentment in this decade of American disillusionment.”
Sensing all the restlessness that had built up during this discourse, and knowing a little something about show biz, the moderator kept his introduction of Larson down to the length of a TV commercial. “Jiggs typifies the laughter of the ’40s,” he offered. “Blondie and Dagwood the laughter of the ’50s, ‘Peanuts’ the laughter of the ’60s, ‘Doonesbury’ the laughter of the ’70s and ‘The Far Side’ the laughter of the ’80s.”
To rollicking, hero-worship applause, our boy approached the podium. People suddenly rose to their feet, quite as if Gary Larson had already knocked them out in concert and they were demanding an encore. I thought about the cartoon he’d done of a checkerboard-jacketed cocktail pianist saying to his senior- citizen, drink-clutching listeners gathered around the keyboard: “Hey, thank you! Thank you! That was Tie a Yellow Ribbon … Now, what say we all really get down?”
Larson was charmingly himself. Blondish, clean-cut, collegiate-looking, casual, he certainly didn’t look 36. He brought to mind, in manner anyway, the early Dick Cavett. He looked a tad stunned by all the uproar. All the same, there was something magnetic about his soft-spokenness as he peered out uneasily at the rows and tiers of well-wishers.
“A lot of people,” he began, “think I’m going to be like someone who’s stepped out of one of his own cartoons. And maybe I am. But I sure have a hard time analyzing it. I’ve tried to be introspective and ask, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ I never have been able to understand where the humor comes from.”
Talking about how he does what he does sometimes made Larson lapse into a kind of dignified embarrassment. “What makes or breaks a cartoon,” he explained, rather tentatively, “comes down to an expression on a character’s face. There are these nuances, and these tangible things. I just try to know when it feels right. I’ve drawn some things that have fallen very flat. Sometimes I’m convinced that one day I’m going to draw the cartoon that offends everyone, and that’ll be the end.”
Since its troubled beginnings in 1979 as a weekly feature in the Seattle Times, Larson’s single-panel cartoon — first known as “Nature’s Way” — has flowered into a bona fide phenomenon. For example: in February 1984, when Sunshine magazine picked up the strip, there were only about 100 U.S. subscribers. Now “The Far Side” is read throughout the English-speaking world as well as in France and Japan. The Far Side Gallery 2 is the third anthology of Larson’s dazzling panels to hit The New York Times best-seller list.
There are 10 “Far Side” books in all, and the ever-swelling quantity of copies in print is well over 6 million. A line of products, designed around the peculiar appeal of Larson’s panoply of unpredictable characters — animal and human — has emerged: sweat shirts, T-shirts, mugs, posters, greeting cards and calendars. Screen director Alan Rudolph is talking seriously with Larson about the prospect of making a feature-length “Far Side” movie.
Gary Larson, of course, isn’t the first irreverent cartoonist to connect with an audience. When Mad hit the scene in the early ’50s and strips like Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” and Gus Arriola’s “Gordo” began to make it big, my friends and I sensed, with all the glandular rebelliousness of smirking adolescents, that things were beginning to open up.
A decade later came the scandalous underground comics. Arguably the most influential cartoonist of that generation was R. Crumb, whose Zap Comix characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural infiltrated the national sub- psyche. It must have been a piece of cake, duck soup, or both, for artists like B. Kliban and “Garfield” crator Jim Davis to waltz right in and get syndicated. That’s how it seemed anyway.
But where did Gary Larson, an unheralded Seattle musician, step into the picture? Where did it begin, this vision of his? How long had this process of transforming the usual into the unusual been “happening” to him before he went public with it? Individual “Far Side” readers are forever letting Larson know how surprised they are that so many other people get what he’s doing. Obviously his work — like superior humor and music the world over — is capable of blowing the lid off of some hidden, weeded-over, back-alley regions of our lives.
Take the “Far Side” world I’ve co-inhabited with Larson. Many of Larson’s frowsy, no-nonsense women — astringent in their dowdy dresses, their upswept hairdos clamped glumly in place like helmets, eyeless behind opaque, oval glasses — are ringers for the relatives and neighbors of my childhood. From living room couches they look on judgmentally, in dour disbelief, at buffalo scuffling to unstick themselves from “buffalo paper,” or at cows encased like hamsters in rolling, see-thru plastic globes.
Other times it’s a world where laboratory scientists — usually physicists, biologists or paleontologists — play childlike with plastic models of prehistoric creatures, or study their own hangnails under the lens of an electron microscope. And always it’s a world where animals interrelate facilely with human culture and with one another in ways as outrageous as they are matter-of-fact. Larson’s cows, for example, are eternally frustrated in a gadget-obsessed world that presupposes the use of opposable thumbs.
Like Al Capp’s characters in “Li’l Abner,” Larson’s cave folk, ancient Egyptains, Norsemen, Einsteins, couch potatoes, reptiles, insects and amoebas aren’t easily forgotten. Often I catch myself laughing up a storm before I even read a word of “The Far Side” — if there happens to be any caption that day.
LARSON DESCRIBES HIS background as “blue collar” and his childhood as “normal,” but from the beginning he has acknowledged some fearfulness about what might be going on out there in the world. Gary and his older brother, Dan — the one who used to hide in the darkness of their closet at bedtime and play scary tricks — were reared in Tacoma, Wash., by an office- secretary mother and an auto-salesman father. Gary’s favorite story book was Mr. Bear Squash You All Flat. Of course, Mr. Bear was in for a surprise when he went to sit on Mr. Porcupine’s house.
“I drew a lot as a child,” Larson told me, at his home in Seattle, “but I never pursued art in any serious fashion. I never took an art or drawing class. Then I stopped for about 10 years. After junior high, I fell away completely from drawing. I was drawn to music. I started on guitar and then — a horrible mistake — I went on to banjo for years. When I got out of Washington State University in 1972, I played music for money for a few years. That was before I took a job in a music store in Lynwood, which was probably the death of my musicianliness.”
Feeling frustrated in that job, Larson took a couple of days off in 1976 and drew half a dozen cartoons. A wilderness magazine in Seattle, Pacific Search (now Pacific Northwest), bought them. “When a check for $90 came in the mail, I was so happy! They’d bought all six at $15 apiece. I got inspired.”
By 1979, the Seattle Times was running “Nature’s Way” once a week, but printing it alongside “Junior Jumble,” a crossword puzzle for kids. “After about a year,” Larson recalls, “I took a trip down to San Francisco and showed the strip to the Chronicle. When I got back to Seattle, I got the letter that the Times had to cancel me because they were getting too many complaints. It was two or three days after this that I got the Chronicle contract. I thought, ‘Geez, that was real close!”‘
When “The Far Side” was first promoted to other newspapers, takers were slow in coming. “Editors themselves were saying, ‘I really like this, but our readers might not be able to handle it,”‘ says Larson. “Newspapers would pick up on it, then drop it, then reinstate it. One step forward and three back.”
In 1984 Larson signed with Universal Press Syndicate. “In the last three years, the thing has really mushroomed. It’s still a weird cartoon, though.”
Questions about his fame make Larson very uncomfortable. Questions about his income seem similarly disquieting. “I’d rather not discuss it,” he said, running a hand over his sandy hair. “I’m doing OK.”
His shyness with reporters notwithstanding, Larson has often provided them with lively copy. Several stories are well-documented. There’s the time his Plymouth Duster hit a mutt when a pack of dogs dashed across the road while he was driving to interview for a job with the Humane Society. There are also the practical jokes he and his friend Ernie Wagner, curator of reptiles at the Seattle Zoo, used to play on one another. After Wagner taped a scissor-snipped string of frozen mice tails intended as python food across the rear window of Larson’s automobile, Larson vengefully dumped 50 pounds of rhino manure into Wagner’s bathtub.
“That was before Ernie and I both settled down,” Larson explained.
HAVING DIGESTED SOME of these tales beforehand, I expected Larson to live in an Addams Family mansion with snakes coiled around the chandeliers, iguanas under the sofa, and other reptiles writhing from the cupboards. But settling down, on Larson’s part, has meant getting rid of his 20 pet king snakes, and the python he once obtained from the Seattle Zoo. “She was 15 feet,” he recalled, “and weighed 150 pounds when I finally woke up to what I had. The snakes just got to be too much.”
Today, breath-stopping paintings of prehistoric reptiles animate the living room and dining room walls of Larson’s two-story, three-bedroom home in a stately Seattle neighborhood. Larson still isn’t sure what he’ll do with the stuffed rhinoceros head that adorns the corner of one downstairs room. “I bought it from a guy,” he told me, looking embarrassed, “who had it in his tavern.”
It’s impossible not to ask about his interest in animals. “I was a biology freak from the ninth grade on,” Larson said. “I squeezed in science electives everywhere; my brother was the same way. I loved to go to the neighborhood swamp in Tacoma, pick up salamanders, bring them home, and try to keep them alive for a few days. I was always drawing dinosaurs — and gorillas and whales.
“I didn’t major in biology, though. I didn’t know what I would do with a four-year degree in biology, so I graduated in communications. In the back of my mind I was thinking of advertising, the creative end. I was going to save the world from inane advertising.
“I’m flattered by biologists’ interest in my work,” he continued. “There’s this panel I did about a mosquito who comes home to his wife from a hard day of spreading malaria. Of course I got these letters reminding me that it’s the female who does the biting. So, besides being sexist in some bizarre way, I was also biologically incorrect.”
Last year’s recipient of the Best Syndicated Cartoonist Award, Larson is an ardent follower of his colleagues’ work, though he spends most of his free time in the company of musicians and basketball buddies. (“To me, playing ball is just something primeval, like killing a mammoth,” says Larson.)
The cartoonist’s greatest inspirations have been Gahan Wilson, Don Martin and B. Kliban. “I like Wilson because he’s morbid. With Don Martin, it’s that surprise last panel and also the way he draws feet. With Kliban, well, he’s drawing cartoons, but they come very close to being something real. And it’s those nuances that can make or break a drawing.”
THE FIRST THING that struck me about Larson’s cozy studio — besides the placement of his cluttered drawing-board by the window overlooking the street — were the bookshelves. They were packed with the likes of Raymond Lee Ditmar’s Thrills of a Naturalist’s Quest and the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects & Spiders. His well-thumbed library also included literary classics, fine arts editions, a sizable collection of jazz biographies and discographies, and Norman N. Holland’s Laughing: A Psychology of Humor.
Resting on a stand in one corner of Larson’s studio was one of the five acoustical guitars he owns, all of them hand-fashioned and custom built. On the music stand was a sheet of score paper upon which Larson had penned the chord changes to the jazz standard, “Nuages,” a wistful, wordless ballad.
Although it was a typically cloudy afternoon in Seattle, Larson was radiant now that we were talking jazz. “I love it, swing and some bop. When I was growing up, I was crazy about Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, and Count Basie’s rhythm guitarist, Freddy Green.” Everything around Larson looked perfect: the stacks of virgin paper on his drawing-board, the books and tapes and LPs, the sketches and pictures and notes pinned to the bulletin boards, even the sleek- looking word processor he’d recently purchased to give his cartoon captions “a professional look.”
The tinkle of door chimes interrupted our discussion. Who could it be? Maybe I was going to get to meet Larson’s girlfriend, the one who had accompanied him on a scuba-diving trip to Indonesia and Bali. No, impossible. Larson told me that she hadn’t yet gotten back from Spain.
No, it was three 10-year-old girls — one blonde, one brunette, one red- haired — and they had bravely undone the front gate and sounded the doorbell. When Larson answered, surveying his nervy young callers, I watched the friendly squint of his easy gray eyes and could tell how perplexed yet relieved he was to see them. Relieved because all Ashley, Maria and Heidi wanted were autographs.
From the name on the mailbox, they had figured it out. This just had to be the house, the house! But Larson knew they weren’t about to ask where he got his ideas, or his theories on the curative powers of laughter, or how much money he made last month. He seemed perplexed, and later he confided that this sort of thing had never happened before, not here at home.
“Heidi,” I asked, butting right in, “what is it about ‘The Far Side’ you like?”
Heidi ignored me and directed herself to her hero exclusively, who was busy signing the single sheet of paper he would presently tear into three pieces.
“I don’t always understand what your comics are about,” Heidi said, “but I like the pictures. I love the pictures.”
“Well, thank you,” Larson said humbly, pleased to have another fan.
