Nearly 25 years after bringing his iconic The Far Side strip to an end, Gary Larson seems to have come around on this whole “internet” thing. The cartoonist has previously pushed back against any digital reproductions of his work—presumably because he was single-handedly keeping the calendar industry alive and the big, hardcover Far Side collections have become family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation—but now the official Far Side website has been updated with what appears to be new art and a message about a “new online era of The Far Side” coming soon. (Also, it’s the internet, so Far Side cartoons have been everywhere forever, but Larson presumably wasn’t happy about it.)
Anyway, the art on the site shows a man thawing out a big block of ice that contains a bunch of recognizable Far Side standards, like an anthropomorphic cow, a dog, a caveman, and a little nerd boy. That means it’s hard to tell whether or not this is teasing new strips or just online versions of the originals, but if there are new ones, there’s something comforting about the indication that The Far Side won’t have changed much in the past few decades.
For those who haven’t been lucky enough to examine one of those aforementioned Far Side tomes (either in book or calendar form), they typically involve some kind of funny image paired with some kind of funny caption… like a woman driving a car with a giant bug in the back seat, and she’s telling herself not to panic because it’s just a bug… but the joke is that the bug is really big. Or, like, there’s a kid trying to push open a door that says “pull,” and in the foreground there’s a sign that says “Midvale school for the gifted.” See, cause it’s a school for smart kids but he’s still trying to open the door the wrong way Trust us, they’re funnier when you can actually see the comics.