Gary Larson

He created a world entirely populated by the lumpy, the big-nosed, the bespectacled, the bug-eyed and the foofy-haired. Welcome to "The Far Side."

By Susan McCarthy

Dec 21, 1999 | When Gary Larson started out as a cartoonist, he didn't know what white-out was. Any time he made a mistake, he threw the drawing out and began again.

This is like a film director not knowing about yelling "Cut!" or like a painter not knowing about turpentine or like a road crew not knowing about jackhammers. There must have been a Great Moment when someone happened to mention the uses of white-out in Larson's presence, a moment so great that only Larson could draw it.

This inspiring revelation comes from "The Prehistory of the Far Side," a splendid 1989 compendium of Larson works from early to late. One section purports to consist of long-lost Very Early works Larson drew as a child. These delineate a hideous childhood with young Gary spending the family dinner hour under the table snapping at scraps, vacationing in the trunk of the family car and being sent out to play on the freeway. Which leads one to suspect that his childhood was in truth idyllic.

While Larson has griped about his brother Dan's teasing -- especially the part about being locked in the darkened basement -- the two did spend many pleasurable hours together, amassing reptiles, flooding the backyard to create a swamp (which they attempted to populate with kidnapped frogs and bugs) or hauling sand into the basement to make a desert.

Around this time, Larson seems to have acquired an Igor complex. His father, perpetually working on projects in his home workshop, would ask him to fetch various tools, and Gary would often bring him the wrong ones -- an experience that's been transmuted into the memory of "stormy lightning-filled nights when my dad, with his own little Igor, tried to bring life to a dead lawnmower."

More recently, in a tribute to Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History, Larson described a fantasy of being Gould's hunchbacked assistant, in a lab coat (even if Gould doesn't wear one, "I would require it for myself") and with an enormous hump ("If you're going to have a hump, don't screw around"), fumbling with crania and enraging Gould by mixing up the Homo habilis and Homo robustus skulls. (He has also portrayed himself as the one soldier in the band storming the castle to glance into the moat and holler, "Oo! Goldfish, everyone! Goldfish!")

Larson, who was born in 1950, grew up in a blue-collar household in Tacoma, Wash. As a kid he liked to draw. He admired his junior high school classmates who could draw cool tanks and airplanes, but preferred to draw dinosaurs, whales and giraffes himself. He never took art lessons and it doesn't seem to have occurred to him to become a cartoonist. "On Career Day in high school, you don't walk around looking for the cartoon guy," Larson says. Too bad. Had there been a Career Day booth staffed by cartoonists, they might have clued him in about the white-out. (Or they might have hit him with a rubber chicken. You never know.)

In high school, Larson abandoned drawing and concentrated on music, principally playing jazz guitar, though there are sinister hints of an affair with the banjo. In college -- Washington State University -- he majored in communication, thinking he'd get a job writing ad copy for television and "save the world from inane advertising," as he told interviewer Al Young. He also crammed every biology and natural history course possible into his schedule.

After graduating in 1972, Larson inexplicably delayed his plunge into advertising reform, forming a jazz duo and then working in a music store. "I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians," he told Robert Cross of the Chicago Tribune. Out of the blue, the fed-up Larson sat down one day in 1976 and drew six cartoons, which he submitted to a local magazine, Pacific Search. They bought them for $90, and Larson was thrilled by the easy money. Next, a weekly paper, the Sumner News Review, paid him a lavish $3 a pop for a weekly cartoon. It wasn't until 1979 that he persuaded the Seattle Times to give him a weekly panel, "Nature's Way."

In the meantime he worked as an investigator for the Humane Society. Driving to the interview for the Humane Society job, Larson reports, a dog pack ran across the road and he hit one of them -- perhaps a sign that this was not fated to be his right livelihood, either. (The dog not only survived, it walked away from the collision.)

The Times placed "Nature's Way" next to its "Junior Jumble," which may have increased the number of readers who complained that the humor was sick and twisted and not in a nice way.

Next Page: "The Far Side" was regularly voted the favorite and the most disliked cartoon

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