As one of the most popular comic strips ever created, it’s no surprise that Gary Larson’s The Far Side has celebrity fans, from Robin Williams to horror writer Stephen King. However, in choosing his favorite strip from the series’ long history, King presents a perfect example of how The Far Side was ahead of its time in combining humor and horror.
In his foreword to The Far Side Gallery 2, King waxes rhapsodic about The Far Side, claiming that even in an age where newspaper comic strips were at the height of their popularity and quality, Gary Larson was “uniquely unique.” King goes on to pick out his favorite of Larson’s work, selecting a strip in which one dog shows another small animals it has killed, stuffed and mounted like hunting trophies. King claims it’s impossible to explain what makes Larson’s work so engaging, but argues that it’s about the cumulative effect of the creator’s surreal worldview, saying:
This cartoon alone only made me smile. But the effect of Larson’s work, unlike that of many surreal cartoonists (I except only Gahan Wilson from the general rule), is cumulative. I found myself not looking at these circumstantial jokes as single things, isolated from one another; they seem somehow connected … I like Gary Larson a lot, partly because he turns the world as I know it inside out like a sock, partly because he turns the world as I know it into a funhouse mirror, but mostly because he does what artists and humorists are supposed to do: he sees what I could see if I could have his eyes. I don’t have them, but thank God they are on loan.
Related: Far Side Got a Rejected Comic Published by Making It Even Darker
Stephen King’s Favorite Far Side Is One of the Darkest
The comic that King singles is out is a relatively straight-forward pun on the idea of “biting the hand that feeds you,” which here is made literal as the dog displays its owner’s severed hand alongside the heads of birds and chickens. It’s a typically surreal, slightly macabre image, and a good example of Larson’s signature trick of recharacterizing animal behavior through a human lens. Like other, more controversial Far Side comics, it’s a non sequitur that implies more ghoulish violence already took place – a fact that’s made all the more unusual given the strip’s contemporaries, with King noting The Far Side was appearing alongside family fare such as Garfield and Peanuts. It’s worth noting that as the author of Cujo, King also explored the idea of a dog killing its owner, but with a very different tone.
Far Side’s Macabre Comedy Was Ahead of Its Time
Of course, there’s nothing outrageous about Larson’s work – though some darker Far Side comics, such as one that sees a group of crocodiles ‘bobbing for poodles,’ did upset readers at the time – but there is definitely an element of the macabre underlying the series. In sharing his influences, Larson has cited his brother tormenting him with made-up monsters, a surreal children’s book where a bear squashes other animals, and his studies of the natural world, where death and violence are a fact of life. In many ways, The Far Side presaged a boom in horror-comedy that’s only reaching its height today, especially in terms of cinema, but managed to do so while remaining identified as a wholesome gag strip – perhaps, as King says, because its perspective is cumulative.
While it certainly leans more comedy than horror, fans of The Far Side won’t be surprised that a horror master like Stephen King finds so much to love in Gary Larson’s quietly morbid comics.
