Wonderful news! Gary Larson has always been my favorite cartoonist. Hilarious visual puns that teeter between dark and light humor so eloquently in a single pane. Really looking forward to more, thanks for coming back Gary! (...now I’m off to slip Bill Watterson a tablet and stylus and see if we can get some new C&H :)
That's an interesting observation. I do agree that the shows you mention might have multiple Far Side-level gags in just a single episode.
But as the other commenter argues, at the time it stood out. I'm perhaps a bit too young to have experienced The Far Side in its heyday, but I vividly remember the truly awful cartoons I'd read in the various newspapers I'd find in my day to day. Garfield was probably one of the better ones, and IMO Garfield is pretty shit, at least in hindsight. And yet I remember having Garfield collection books.
With the obvious exception of The Simpsons, this kind of humour was quite rare for its time. With the explosion of the internet (especially memes) and various animated shows it's now pretty ordinary.
I'd be surprised if most of the modern famous animators (Trey and Matt, Seth MacFarlane, etc) weren't fans of The Far Side.
I think I actually enjoyed the prose before the comics more than the comics themselves (although the first one got a good laugh out of me). Definitely glad he's back and I'm looking forward to more.
It's interesting to see the new art style. It's neat how much more detailed the comics are. The coloring is a bit more smudgy looking, if that makes sense? IIRC he didn't color his own comics before so I suppose it's not a surprise that they're different.
It's clearly a very different process, the old comics were colored in the largely pre-digital world so it would have been a matter of him handing a B&W image to the syndicate, who then colored it by laying down a very limited set of flat tones. Probably by cutting out bits of zipatone and manually making the cyan/magenta/yellow plates after a quick watercolor sketch of what colors they wanted. The strip ended in 1995, when Photoshop was version 3. Not CS3, that's actually v10. Version 3. Distributed on floppies.
The new ones are very much My First Digital Painting; you can see him experimenting with leaving the ink lines behind in the taxi and cub scout pieces, but keeping them in the alien piece. He's got a lot of tools to get the hang of before he settles down into a regular style, if he ever does - dude's seventy years old and retired, he ain't gotta treat this as more than a hobby if he doesn't want to IMHO.
That very first taxi joke (I won't spoil it for you) made me happy. I had to dwell on the comic, make up a small world in my mind where that situation could possibly make sense, and just generally revel in the absurdity of it. Glad he's back!
I think it’s just a variation on one of his common tropes- take a recognizable situation (Cub Scouts having a picnic outdoors) and then flip the situation around so that the things that usually do the action (eating) are now the subjects receiving the action (being eaten). I think he chose bears to be the ones eating the Cub Scouts because bears live in the woods and also the “cub” in Cub Scouts comes from bear cubs.
I loved reading Far Side as a kid. But my reaction to probably 10% of them was "I don't know if I am too dumb to get the joke or the joke is too dumb for me to recognize it as a joke."
Another childhood fan here. After poring over all of the Galleries and the Anthology, my overall take was that if you don't get it, you're overthinking it (and thus, have become a part of the joke).
Speaking for myself, I definitely had some instances of the former. But I was relieved to learn years later than "Cow Tools" was an instance of the latter.
I'd say, with the utmost respect for Larson, that this isn't so much one you're too dumb to get as it is a rare flub in his impressive oeuvre!
For me this comic combined with the general limitations of what he does are what make him second to Bill Watterson. Somehow Watterson managed to be much broader and yet as far as I know there's not a single flub in any of his Calvin & Hobbes comics.
I suspect, now that Gary is self publishing and doesn’t need to cater to syndication and mass media, he can explore some edgy stuff. Age makes people salty as well. I liked the comic - the normality of the family eating a typical meal and using their condiments of choice, while manifesting our fears and expectations of savage nature - dark for sure, but “funny”.
I rather saw this as hailing back to some of the tasteless savagery of his earliest work. I guess there's a problem with me that it's my favorite of the new batch!
I've always been a big fan of Gary Larson's. While I didn't always "get" his humour, which was often about as warped as mine and sometimes beyond my ken, I almost always enjoyed it and never found it blatantly offensive. And NEVER, EVER did I find anything he did cross a line into poor taste bordering on obscenity.
I found the "Bears Eating Cub Scouts" cartoon violates every rule of decency I can think of. It's so out of character from anything else he's ever done (that I'm aware of, anyway) that I have to believe there must be some sort of misprint or other clerical error involved.
Please tell me that's the case, and clue me in on what I'm missing.
Bill Conkey
Durham, NC
If you or anyone felt somehow disturbed, so did I. But it's not as if Larson did this for the first time. The image about the farmer bringing eggs home, and meets a chicken carrying an infant comes to mind.
Wow. that's the weirdest 'flag' I've encountered on HN yet. While perhaps a content warning would've been nice, learning that apparently bears eat cubs was a very surprising thing for me to learn, and videos of it exactly the type of thing I wanted to see!
The Far Side was an exceptional "comic". It wonderfully illustrated how much could be conveyed with so little visual representation (and nothing else). I truly enjoyed all of it over the years... I actually owned half a dozen or more physical books!
I greatly enjoy reading Gary Larson's explanation of his mentality that led him to where he is now... and I find it particularly amusing that he used so many words to express his thoughts! His cartoons were bereft of words, but they still conveyed so much meaning :)
Now if Bill Watterson comes out of retirement and starts drawing Calvin and Hobbes again that’d make everyday just a little bit better.
A fan made Hobbes and Bacon https://imgur.com/gallery/tUzAL usually fan art never measures up to the original but this is that exception to the rule. It choked me up a bit to see Hobbes play with Bacon - Calvin’s little daughter.
Dana Simpson is not Bill Watterson and Phoebe And Her Unicorn is not Calvin And Hobbes, but when Dana started syndication, Universal gave her a copy of the complete C&H, and she still suspects it may have been a not-so-subtle hint that they expected her to fill those shoes. P&HU has a similar dynamic of "smart kid with a magical animal companion", and an artist who refuses to bow down to the ultra-simplified styles so many strips adopt to work at the miniscule sizes a lot of papers want to squeeze them into.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense! Ozy and Millie always reminded me heavily of Calvin and Hobbes. Hadn't heard of Phoebe and Her Unicorn before; may have to check it out.
As a consolation, check out the 'April Fools' comics in the new Berkeley Breathe 'Bloom County' comics. He works with Watterson to create 'Calvin County' on those days.
Those who miss Calvin might also like Alice: https://www.alicecomics.com/comic/welcome/. The main character Alice frequently engages in flights of fancy like Calvin’s Spaceman Spiff episodes. She doesn’t have an animal companion, but she does sometimes bring her human friend Dot along.
Alice has 1,057 strips in its archive. It is no longer being updated, but all the important plot threads were resolved by the end.
I think that site is hacked. Its trying to get me to download a flash updater. (actually downloaded a dmg when I clicked back, which was a weird trick). maybe its just the ad network.)..
This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I've never regretted stopping when I did.
I agree with that. The kids grow up. Continuing it is like someone who refuses to become an adult and remains an adolescent into what should be their productive adult years.
Bloom County, Dilbert (shudder), Doonesbury (though the characters at least aged and moved through life)... All pretty much wore out whatever made them special in their prime.
Outland and Opus. Neither of which were great. He also came back on Facebook for a time to poke fun at Donald Trump. Who could resist? But that wasn't really great either.
Eh. There's the odd fun strip or sequence now and then. But it's mostly stuck in the 90s Pac Bell cubicle world where Scott Adams worked. There's so much fresh SV material to mine that Dilbert really doesn't. (And that's leaving aside Scott Adams' personal persona.)
You really nailed what I hadn't been able to verbalize. Dilbert is still stuck in a world that no longer exists. The open hostility, hierarchy, etc. of the corporate world has been replaced with this kind of generic feel-goodyness that still has the same sociopathic corporate behaviors but cloaked in some kind of faux "meaning"... the HBO show really nails some of this while Dilbert feels antiquated.
It’s hard for me to appreciate Scott’s daily dose of misanthropy. By the time I get to the comics page, I’ve already been dosed with the pure, uncut stuff on the front page, spoken by our American President.
Just let Calvin & Hobbes stand as its own beautiful finished thing. One of the reasons Calvin & Hobbes is so timeless and beloved is that it's not _that_ anchored in any particular time period. While it's dated somewhat by its big chunky TVs and landline phones, most of the "Calvin being a kid"-ness is timeless. Hobbes & Bacon couldn't make it five panels without referencing contemporary politics.
I agree with you 100% - it is done and Watterson has earned his retirement and then some, it is just the irrational, insatiable part of my psyche - you know the one that wants just one more chocolate covered almond, one more crisp, one more beer - that part wants one more. Just One More - that’s the story of our gluttonous journey through time.
I know this feeling very well. But after seeing so many things I liked slide into substandard mockeries of their peaks, I'm more than happy to watch people draw a line around their work and say "this is done".
I’m glad he’s producing new comics. I’ll admit I prefer his pre-digital style, but I’m happy to see how his comics change without deadlines or being beholden to editors.
This is amazing. I loved The Far Side as a kid, and for the last year or so my son and I have switched from me reading books to him, to him reading Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side to me. The Far Side is by far is favourite, I can't wait to tell him this!
I've always liked Far Side and I think he has his hand-drawn style pat, but the new tablet-drawn ones look... distractingly amateurish, for lack of a better word.
Exhibit A: the faces of the drivers in the "taxidermist" gag, which are all soggy blurs. I'm sure this is to some extent intentional to avoid drawing too much attention to these peripheral features, but still: https://imgur.com/a/k9ZLv5s
That said, it's obviously a new medium for him, so I hope he keeps at it and works out what his new digital style can be.
> In the same image, the pedestrians up top do have crisply drawn features
The are supposed to have them, in order to match the figure where the joke is.
Larson jokes are in big part visual jokes: he draws intentionally so that a reader has to "look around" in the picture until he "gets it." And that is what makes the "click" and that deep "ooooh" effect.
For that to function the "level of attention" has to be "manipulated". The cars in the front are allowed to be "out of focus" but the part of the picture "in focus" should not "give out" too soon the gag.
So the cartoon functions correctly, the "direction" inside of the cartoon is brilliant. The cartoon is however, I admit, more "raw" than what would be expected from some kinds of products (e.g. it's not something that would end up being in an ad, for example, exactly because some people have some specific expectations). But it's the real Larson and everything is where is should be. And he also wrote that he's "just exploring, experimenting, and trying stuff."
Part of it is because he’s painting now whereas before he was mostly drawing. You just can’t get as much detail that way.
But even so, yes, this looks amateurish. Which is probably due to he fact that he no longer paints / draws for a living and because he’s just starting out in this medium.
I dunno how interested we as a community are in art styles but I have to say that it's clear much more time went into drawing these. They are much more detailed visually.
This being hacker news I was hoping he'd talk about his gear a bit. Maybe we could even help him out a bit since he wrote that he's still figuring it out. :-D
Agreed. But, I'd give 10:1 that he's using an iPad Pro + Pencil. Got one a few months ago, have never drawn anything meaningful in my life, but the tools are so good that I wanted to start.
"Cow Tools" had me in uncontrolled tears of laughter in a bookshop back in the 80's. I thought I was going to have to be carried out of the shop as did everyone else. Larson always perfectly hit the funny spot in my brain, even now.
