All Creatures Weird and Funny

By James Kelly

Parents, be wise and heed this advice: watch how your children spend their free time, because playful pursuits have a way of shaping adult occupations. Take Gary Larson. As a youngster growing up in Tacoma, Larson collected lizards, snakes, frogs, salamanders and one monkey. Aided by his older brother, he regularly flooded the backyard to create swamps. Once, for a change of pace, the Larson boys hauled sand into the basement and built a miniature Mojave complete with horned toads. Throughout it all, Larson's parents remained remarkably serene, even that day when Dad, a car salesman, came home and found his son's 8-ft. boa constrictor curled up in the sewing machine.

Today Larson is 36, but he still pursues an antic fascination with nature in his daily cartoon The Far Side, which appears in 550 newspapers. Larson's work has been collected in eight books (total copies: 5 million); his latest, The Far Side Gallery 2 (Andrews, McMeel & Parker; $9.95), is the nation's top- selling trade paperback, according to Publishers Weekly. His sketches adorn T shirts, mugs, calendars and greeting cards. His creatures may not be as ubiquitous as Garfield or Snoopy, but then, Larson began selling his work only ten years ago. Says he of his rapid success: "It's all sort of surreal."

That is also a good way to describe The Far Side, an absurdist, sometimes sinister world where animals do the unnatural (i.e., act like humans) and often trump mankind along the way. A female moose, in a slip and curlers, hands the phone to her husband, sitting in his easy chair. "It's the call of the wild," she says. As a woman crouches to feed nuts to two squirrels, one of the furry creatures says to his companion, "I can't stand it . . . They're so cute when they sit like that." Larson's humans fare no better when . dealing with their own kind. As two scholarly explorers approach a tribal hut, the occupants race around hiding the TV set and telephone and yelling, "Anthropologists! Anthropologists!" The Far Side is not for those who think Dagwood and Blondie stretch the limits of wackiness. Two pilots sit atop a large naked infant on a runway. Says one flyer to the control tower: "Fuel . . . check. Lights . . . check. Oil pressure . . . check. We've got clearance. O.K., Jack, let's get this baby off the ground."

Though the young Larson liked to draw dinosaurs and gorillas, he did not dream of becoming a cartoonist. Instead, as a communications major at Washington State University in Pullman, he hoped someday to save the world from mundane advertising. As it turned out, the world was not ready for salvation when he graduated, so he played the banjo in a duo and worked at a music store. The latter job so depressed Larson that in 1976 he temporarily quit to try his hand at drawing. In two days he sketched a few cartoons and sold them (six for $90) to a local magazine. Two years later the Seattle Times began running him regularly, followed by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1980. Today he is carried by the country's largest papers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News.

Larson lives and works in a spacious Tudor-style house in suburban Seattle. His artistic sensibility invades his home: a papier-mache python winds through the living room, and a bright green Paraguayan tree frog croaks in a terrarium. At Christmas a wreath festooned with a rubber chicken hangs on the front door. Larson, clad usually in T shirt, jeans and running shoes, carries sketchbooks wherever he goes, doodling and jotting down phrases. But the hard labor takes place at the drawing board overlooking Union Bay, where he sits and stares, and stares and sits, until the ideas flow. "A strange juxtaposing of things takes place that I don't understand," says Larson. "It just happens." When it is not happening, he stops to strum his guitar; sometimes he works until 3 a.m. to meet a deadline.

Larson credits Don Martin of Mad magazine, George Booth of The New Yorker and B. Kliban, famed for his cat cartoons, with influencing his style; his work also seems informed by the bloated grotesqueries of Gahan Wilson (Playboy, The New Yorker). Nonetheless, Larson's vision is like no other cartoonist's. If a single theme animates his work, it is that man, for all his | achievements, is just one species on earth, and not always the wisest or strongest one. His prehistoric cave dwellers and chunky matrons with beehive hairdos and sequined glasses are vulnerable and foolish, while his cows and bears are wise and resourceful. "It's wonderful that we live in a world in which there are things that can eat us," says Larson. "It keeps us from getting too cocky."

Occasionally Larson's editors censor his wit, deleting scatological references or asking him to soften a caption. If Larson is bothered by this, he also realizes that his warped humor is not typical funny-page fare. In fact, he seems nonplussed that something as bizarre as The Far Side could be so popular or that he could be handsomely paid for letting his imagination race wild. "Maybe it's my blue-collar background, but work meant to me that you come home covered with sweat," he says. "Now I just have to brush away the eraser shavings." Larson may dirty his hands soon. He is thinking of turning his backyard into a swamp stocked with salamanders, frogs and koi. And, of course, childhood memories.

With reporting by Michael Riley/Seattle