Gary Larson

As early as 1987, Larson was telling interviewers that the pace of seven "Far Side" comics a week was getting to him. "I think I'm maintaining the quality, but internally I'm paying for it," he told Rolling Stone.

In 1987 Larson married Toni Carmichael, an archeologist and environmental consultant. In 1988, to widespread dismay, he took a break of 14 months from drawing "The Far Side." He traveled to Africa and the Amazon, studied jazz guitar with Jim Hall, published "Prehistory" and negotiated an agreement under which, on his return, he would draw just five panels a week.

Fans were delighted and relieved when he returned to the drawing table in 1990, but five years later, in January 1995, Larson stopped drawing "The Far Side" altogether. He said he felt the quality of the work was going down, and wanted to avoid what he called "the Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons."

If he was burning out, it wasn't surprising. He had drawn more than 4,000 brilliant cartoons since syndication in 1979, each one a self-contained setup and payoff. A strip cartoon lets a cartoonist get days if not weeks of material out of one or two premises, but single cartoons are far more demanding. Maybe if Larson had done a strip, he wouldn't have tired of it as soon as he did, but maybe his vision just wasn't built that way. (Maybe if he'd learned about white-out sooner, he would've lasted longer, too ...)

Certainly, in the vast world of "The Far Side," there is repetition. It's true that the cartoon where the cows complain that they can't answer the phone because they have no opposable thumbs and the one where the snake can't answer the phone because he's in the process of swallowing a pig whole are similar -- but each has been cited as an all-time "Far Side" favorite. One could argue that the repetitive panels are like jazz riffs on the same melody -- but the fact remains that Larson was ready to stop.

There was widespread mourning at the news of "The Far Side's" demise, including a long tribute in the Nation by Alexander Cockburn. Columnist Gerry Rising sent out an Internet appeal to scientists to name their favorite Larson cartoon as a way of honoring "The Far Side." Hundreds wrote in and Rising compiled their tribute. The top three favorites were dinosaur cartoons. The classic "Real Reason for Dinosaur Extinction" shows dinosaurs smoking. Another shows dinosaurs mocking a primitive mammal, not noticing that it has begun to snow. The third tells of the sad death of Professor Higginbottom, who attempted to resolve the cold-blooded/warm-blooded dinosaur controversy with the aid of a large rectal thermometer and was never met with again.

But walk into any biology department -- indeed almost any science department in the country -- and you wouldn't know "The Far Side" had ever stopped running. Panels are still taped and thumbtacked everywhere.

Since stopping drawing "The Far Side," Larson hasn't entirely abandoned cartooning. He's made two animated films, "Tales From the Far Side" and "Tales From the Far Side II," with music by the Bill Frisell Quartet. And in 1998 Larson published "There's a Hair in My Dirt: A Worm's Story," a book whose cheerfully colored illustrations repay close scrutiny, adorned as they are with satisfying detail -- an eagle carrying off a poodle, a satellite dish on a thatched cottage, a songbird doing a Harvey Keitel imitation. Not only that, E.O. Wilson wrote the foreword.

The main character in the tale told by Father Worm to his little worm son is a beautiful (human) maiden named Harriet. We know she is beautiful because Father Worm says so (additional clues: long golden hair and tiara), but she is a truly Larsonian beauty in her lumpy, big-nosed, foofy-haired glory. She's also full of idiotic human misconceptions about nature, which Larson, via Father Worm, fiercely debunks. Larson has said that his cartoons have "no conscious message," but the same isn't true of "There's a Hair in My Dirt."

The true "Far Side" spirit is less in the book's explicit message, however, than in the peripheral dramas (Larson cites Mad magazine's Sergio Arragones as an influence) -- the fate of "ruggedly handsome" Lumberjack Bob, the pursed lips on the astounded caterpillar peering up the beautiful maiden's dress, the raccoon raiding the garbage at the back of Harriet's cottage.

So Larson hasn't quit cartooning; he's just quit delivering the daily hit. I resent that, of course, because I was used to it. Now that I think of it, it would have been handier still to have Larson curled up on top of my refrigerator turning out cartoons. I know I'm not the only one who'd happily have white-out delivered to his house in tanker cars if he'd just go back to the daily grind. But as surely as a cow joy-riding on a hijacked tractor, or the man due to be hanged whose hangman can't make a good knot, or the primitive man in the outhouse caught completely off-guard by the Ice Age, Larson deserves his freedom.

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