10 Far Side Comics Starring The Strip’s Secret Recurring Character

Iconic newspaper cartoon The Far Side didn’t feature an ongoing narrative, or characters that carried over from strip to strip – but one name popped up with enough frequency that he can be called the “secret recurring character” of the comic’s run: Al. Though not always appearing in the flesh, Al’s presence was felt in some of Far Side creator Gary Larson’s most memorable drawings.

The Far Side is best remembered for the dexterity of its humor; one day a panel could deliver innocuous word-play, and then the next morning, readers could open their newspaper to the funny pages to find a strip depicting the end of the world.

This consistent swerving back and forth from the inane to the profound, from lighthearted to bleak darkness – with regular stops at outrageous and inexplicable in between – is on full display in the Far Side panels featuring Al. More than a character, Al embodied Gary Larson’s humorous critique of entrepreneurs and commerce, for better or worse.

10

Al’s Humble Beginnings As A Seafood Purveyor

First Published: May 28, 1980

The first appearance of Al in The Far Side is also one notable panel where a human character named Al can be identified – presumably, he is the man behind the counter of “Al’s C-Food,” wearing a chef’s hat and a grease-stained apron. This panel established several of the aspects that would come to define Gary Larson’s use of Al over the course of The Far Side’s run.

The name “Al” would become a go-to for a variety of different small businesses throughout the years. Further, the strip’s focus is not Al, who is merely a background character, but the ship-in-a-bottle that is inexplicably planning to escape. In fact, when it came to Al – as future entries will make clear – a greater focus on him, or his business, usually equated to a greater likelihood of calamity.

9

Al’s Charter Business Lands His Customer In Hot Water

First Published: July 4, 1980

Here, Al is shown to be involved with more than just cooking fish – he also runs a charter fishing operation. The joke here, of course, is that a man has accidentally hooked his own wife; a catch, to be sure, but not the one he rented the boat for. Again, Al’s important role here comes in providing the setting of the panel, and being a bystander as something unusual happens.

This panel represents the more straightforrward vein of Gary Larson’s humor in The Far Side. Though the comic is frequently cited as having punclines that weren’t immediately evident, with their humor often needed to be puzzled out by the reader, this was far from always the case. Al and his many businesses were often used in Far Side’s more easily decipherable installments – though not always.

8

Al’s Rat Control Believes The Customer Is Always Right

First Published: July 17, 1980

This Far Side strip takes Al out of his previous maritime context, casting him instead in the role of an exterminator having a particular strange encounter at work. While not providing the setting this time, Al once again fulfills the critical role of bringing an outside perspective into a prototypically bizarre Far Side scenario.

“I’m sorry, we did call an exterminator,” a group of rats in a human trench coat say to the man from “Al’s Rat Control,” pausing before adding, “but we’ve changed our minds.” One essential quality of Gary Larson’s humor was capturing a single moment, often one with many questions loaded into it. That is the case here, as readers are left to wonder whether Al can tell he’s speaking to vermin masquerading as a human, or what exactly happened inside that apartment.

7

Al Goes Down With The Ship In A Particularly Dark Far Side

First Published: February 9, 1983

Characters often met tragic fates in The Far Side, and here, Al is at the heart of one of Gary Larson’s bleakest jokes. Back on the high seas, “Al’s Glass Bottom Tours” suffers a catastrophe, as the boat’s hull is pierced, causing it to flip over and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

The darkness of this strip result from Gary Larson’s morbid speculation about what the last moments of a sunken glass-bottom boat would be like. The glass-bottom allows him to depict the tourists on the boat, faces pressed up against the glass in horror as they face a watery grave. There is humor in the trio of fish curiously looking at the humans, the tables having been turned, though this without a doubt among the heaviest Far Side cartoons, should the viewer spend just a few seconds too long contemplating its premise.

6

Al’s Business Ventures Extend Into Some Unexpected Territory

First Published: March 11, 1983

In contrast to the bleakness of the previous entry, this is a largely silly Far Side entry. That isn’t to say it is frivolous, as it contains much of the strip’s familiar subtext, slyly commenting on human history and modern capitalist society at once. However, the joke is simple, as a prehistoric individual stumbles across “Al’s Hardware” deep in the jungle, with the caption: “Primitive man discovers tools.”

This is one of the best examples of Gary Larson’s use of the name “Al” as a catch-all entrepreneurial shorthand. It is used as a way of giving this Far Side strip an extra bit of personality – character, so to speak, even if Al himself didn’t appear as a character. The joke certainly would have worked had the sign just said “Hardware Store” – but calling it “Al’s” is an extra step that dials in the specificity of the joke, making it funnier.

5

Al Is Front & Center In Another One Of The Most Gruesome Far Side Comics

First Published: March 15, 1983

In this comic, Al – or at least, one of his employees – is responsible for what might be the ghastliest death in The Far Side. Though it is rendered extra cartoonishly, with Gary Larson using the less detailed pencil-sketch style, the concept of “Al’s Metal Compacting” having inadvertently crushed a person inside their car is legitimately horrifying.

The eyes and arms of a mangled individual can be made out in the crushed cube of metal hanging from a crane in the upper-left corner of the frame; however, Larson smartly uses the composition of this panel to draw the reader’s immediate attention away from this detail. By putting Al’s name in the bottom-left corner, viewers’ are immediately drawn to that. Next, they realize the curious detail of the heart-shaped locket falling from the cube of metal – and finally, upon studying the image, the full context of the scene becomes frightfully clear.

4

Al Has To Keep Business Up One Way Or Another

First Published: May 2, 1983

In what is perhaps the funniest “Al” installment of The Far Side, a man examines the crumpled note tied to a brick that just smashed through his window. The note reads:

Brick thrown thru your window? CALL AL’S GLASS 555-1232

Gary Larson’s humor was regularly absurd, but the maniacal quality of the punchline here stands out as one of his most laugh-out-loud jokes. Again, the humor here is designed to leave the reader asking “What-the?”, as just the first of many questions.

The idea that Al would vandalize people’s homes in order to advertise his business as the one homeowners should go to if they experience vandalism is patently ridiculous – which makes it particularly amusing. The punchline is once more further emphasized by Gary Larson’s ever-present underlying cultural critique, evoking the idea one way to ensure a sustainable business model is to create a problem that needs fixing.

3

Al Is In The Wrong Place At The Right Time Again

First Published: April 20, 1984

Another stand-out panel featuring Al as a background character, this strip illustrates the agony of an indoor cat forced to watch from the window as trucks for “Bob’s Assorted Rodents” and “Al’s Small Flightless Birds” suffer a head-on collision. As the drivers of Bob and Al’s trucks argue, their cargo scurry every which way, in what would certainly be a field day for any feline not stuck inside.

The hilarity of this panel starts with its delivery the cat’s perspective, and then is magnified as the reader considers the goofiness of these two incredibly niche businesses, and then incredible improbability that the two trucks would happen to be driving in opposite directs at the exact same moment, and somehow crash. Another one of Gary Larson’s lighter Far Side strips, Al is once more a small but vital part of making the strip’s humor as specific as possible.

2

Al And Bob Continue To Have Major Problems

First Published: November 9, 1986

Al was most frequently a name attached to a business in The Far Side, with this panel being one notable exception, as he appears in another one of Gary Larson’s most well-used recurring bits: the desert island. This panel also features a reprise of Al and Bob’s conflict from the previous entry. While the two were last depicted yelling at each other after a head-on collision, here Larson strands them together on a small island in the middle of nowhere.

Hilariously, rather than setting aside their differences, the enmity between the two is shown to have continued unabated. Scrawled on their island’s single tree is a repeating refrain of back-and-forth insults: “Al is a moron, Bob’s a jerk.” Once again, the ocean proved less than favorable to Al, as Gary Larson gleefully made him a castaway on an island with someone he couldn’t stand.

1

Al Is Going To Lose His Driver’s License After This One

First Published: October 16, 1986

In another one of Gary Larson’s quirkier strain of Far Side comics, an “Al’s Monsters” truck is depicted as having crashed into a tree, containing a treehouse full of kids. While the kids seem fine, Al is shown to be unconscious behind the wheel. More crucially, the faces of the kids peering out from the treehouse door ask the question the reader is already thinking, which is “what exactly was Al hauling?”

Once more, Far Side readers are privy to only an instant, as Al’s fate – and the repercussions of his reckless driving – are left for the reader to decide. It is unlikely that even artist Gary Larson himself would have a suitable answer to the questions raised by this comic, and that is a crucial part of what continues to make The Far Side enduringly wonderful to successive generations of fans.