The art style of Gary Larson’s The Far Side is instantly recognizable to even casual fans, making it all the more surprising when the comic creator chooses to do something a little different. Indeed, sometimes Larson uses ‘bad’ art as the focus of some of his best gags.
These are the 10 best The Far Side comics that deliberately use terrible art, from messed-up faces to missing details to seemingly pointless scribbles, as well as some straight-forward jokes that rank among the strip’s best. And don’t forget to vote for your favorite entry in our end-of-article poll!
10 Morning Face
It Sucks to Be a Cartoon
Larson tackles the common embarrassment of ‘morning breath’ (or ‘mild transient oral malodor’) through the lens of The Far Side, coming up with this embarrassing take on the malady. Like many of the entries on this list, a lot of the joy here comes from the reader first seeing the art, then reading the caption, then revisiting the image with the right context. At first glance, it’s hard to imagine what Larson could be going for, and yet with five words it all falls into place.
9 Old Cartoonists’ Home
Larson Calls Out a Common Artistic Weakness
In this charming vision of what might be Larson and his contemporaries’ future, elderly cartoonists do battle via brutal graffiti caricatures, albeit drawn with shaking hands. From the names on the walls, it seems Larson spared his competitors the indignity of being depicted (although he wasn’t always so kind in his references to rival cartoons). The purest joy for fans of comics is “Bob can’t draw feet” – a common weakness that afflicts even some wildly successful comic artists, who will use boxes, dust clouds, and even other characters to hide their creations’ lower legs at all costs.
8 Bugs
Sometimes, The Far Side Makes You Work For It
Another image that seems like it couldn’t possibly make sense at first glance, this The Far Side has the supreme confidence to eschew a caption and allow the reader to figure out what’s going on for themselves. Once they do, readers will realize the art on show isn’t actually ‘bad’ – it’s an incredibly accurate rendering of the crushed bug (or bugs) on the artist’s shoe. Why the artist has chosen this particular invertebrate as his muse is left to the reader’s imagination.
7 Sketchy Customers
The Far Side Breaks the Fourth Wall
A perfect example of The Far Side breaking the fourth wall, this strip is a simple pun on the dual meaning of “sketchy” – both “disreputable” and “hastily drawn.” While it wasn’t exactly rare at the time, Larson’s comics predicted how popular metahumor would become decades after The Far Side‘s original run (though puns are of course timeless.) Artists reading the comic can only imagine the incredible work that must have gone into making these characters look like they were quickly dashed off, while keeping the joke as clear and uncluttered as possible.
6 Far Side Lite
Gary Larson Takes on Diet Culture
The ‘bad art’ in this strip is particularly fun because it doesn’t immediately grab the eye as deliberately terrible – in fact, a casual reader might not even notice anything is wrong at first. However, with the help of the caption, it’s immediately clear that everything – from people to cars to the windows – are drawn in a narrow, ‘fat free’ style, as fans get the health-food equivalent of their usual Far Side.
5 Scribbled
Is This The Far Side’s Most Pitiful Named Character?
Larson’s chunky, beady-eyed humans are immediately recognizable, so it’s surprising to see The Far Side eschew these quasi-recurring characters for stick figures. Here, like ‘Morning Face,’ cartoon characters face an ailment peculiar to their world, though of a far more serious nature.
Again, the art itself can just about pass muster as normal – stick figures might be unusual for The Far Side, but they’re not outrageous – only to be revealed as part of the joke by the caption. With his grim face of disappointment and jug-eared appearance, it’s easy to imagine this cartoon is from a sideways world where Larson created Charlie Brown’s Peanuts, rather than the cow-obsessed Far Side. Of course, on the occasion Larson did draw Charlie Brown, he wasn’t quite the charming character Charles M. Schulz fans know.
4 Picasso
Larson Writes an Entire Sketch in One Image
While ‘Morning Face’ plays with the rules of a cartoon world, it’s a one-note joke that’s exactly what it looks like, and doesn’t ask that much from the reader. Here, however, Larson takes the same execution and adds another layer, as fans learn that Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portraits weren’t the product of artistic vision, but the result of his family’s uniquely mangled faces. Part of the joy here is Larson creating a world where the Picasso family’s faces can look as they do, yet still be so uncommon that Pablo’s teacher can’t imagine his drawings are accurate.
The caption of this comic also nails a major Far Side trick – implying moments before and after the ‘captured’ image that make the joke even funnier. As Mrs. Picasso promises to meet Pablo’s teacher “face to face,” readers are invited to imagine an entire sketch where the shocked art teacher has to backpedal on Pablo’s grade, having realized the surprising truth.
3 Not Even Drawn Yet
Another Cartoon Ailment
For some reason, when it comes to The Far Side, absence is the funniest version of the ‘cartoon problems in a realistic world’ gag. Partly it’s to do with how Larson sells the gag, as everything from Murray’s ‘expression’ to the open newspaper to the vest and stubble make it clear that he isn’t ready to leave, even though he can’t possible be held responsible for whether or not he’s been drawn. However, it’s also the case that Larson’s minimalistic style makes every ‘missing’ detail stand out – few people can conjure a room with a few rectangles, a straight line, and a lamp, let alone one that perfectly frames the punchline.
2 The Stork (& Other Stick Figure Comics)
Larson’s Stick Figure Comics Are Some of His Best
Larson’s stick-figure comics are among his best, taking the logic of the barely-drawn character and creating new ‘rules’ where their depiction is taken as literally as possible. For the best of the bunch, we’ve chosen a stick figure couple who are being brought a baby by the stork – reduced to a ball on a stick by the implications of their world. It’s a fun visual gag, and one that invests in its delivery with details like a stick figure dog and the stork’s shadow.
However, several other stick figure comics came close to winning out. The image of a stick person being snatched up by a bird for use in its nest is a reversal of simple drawings standing in for more complex ideas, while a cowboy stickman casting a shadow from off-panel is snort-worthy once his rival addresses him as “slim.” ‘Evolution of the Stickman’ puts a playful twist on Rudolph Zallinger’s iconic ‘March of Progress,’ with the playful end result all the more lovable for the implied evolution it took to get there.
However, perhaps the best after the stork comic is a group of stick figures playing volleyball – a comic Larson created when he was seven, and included in the Hound of the Far Side collection. Even at such a young age, Larson is playing with the ‘rules’ that the art style creates, as the stick figures accidentally end up using their friend’s circular head as the ball.
1 Michelangelo vs Funucci
The Far Side Takes on ‘The Creation of Adam’
This Far Side wins out as Larson’s best ‘bad art’ comic purely because of the genuinely funny central idea. Competing for the right to paint the Sistine Chapel’s fresco ceiling, Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’ competes against a drawing of a smiling stick figure family. A lot of details make this comic funny, but the weirdly sweet nature of Funucci’s drawing (which could have been anything) somehow makes it an even more amusing source of competition. Of course, there’s also the implication that this is some kind of final round, and Funucci’s prior work somehow kept him in the running.
What makes this comic interesting for comic fans, however, is how Larson simultaneously mocks and sincerely uses the same ‘rule’ of art. Funucci’s stick figure drawing is clearly terrible on the face of it, but when you look at Michelangelo’s art, it’s not actually much better – after all, his figures may be more fleshed out, but they’re not detailed (they don’t even have the stick family’s eyes or mouths.) Larson’s comic somehow gets the reader to take the stick figures at face value, but to treat Michelangelo’s similarly sketchy work as an obvious signifier for a more skilled piece. On paper, there’s no way a single-panel comic should be able to guide the reader through these two different assumptions, and yet…
The Far Sideis so timeless because it is constantly inventive, finding many different ways to be witty – from the captions to the ‘moment’ chosen for each comic, to even the art style used. These The Far Side comics should also give amateur comic artists a little hope – if your joke is well-thought-out, bad art can sell the joke rather than hurting it.
