- 1.8K Posts
- 322 Comments
Some background on this comic:
Transcript (sketch):
“Oooooo!.. Mr. Van Horn!.. The duck is back–staring at your back.”
Raymond could feel it…First a tingling at the base of his neck and then a cold sweat would quickly engulf his body–yes, the duck was staring at him again."
Transcript (commentary):
Another example of perhaps overworking a cartoon. In hindsight, I wish I had used the final drawing but with the second caption in the sketch above, which begins, “Raymond could feel it…” It just seems a little more interesting to me.
In coming up with the name for the phobia, I played around with words like “quackaphobia” and “duckalookaphobia” and so on. But then I got the bright idea to look up the scientific name for ducks, and discovered their family name is Anatidae. Ad so, I ended up coining a word that twelve ornithologists understood and everyone else probably went, “Say what?”
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
THE WRONG NUMBER
Larry lived alone in his small inner-city apartment. He had no friends and most people ignored him at all costs.
Then one day, unexpectedly, the phone rang. And Larry was surprised to find himself talking to God.
“Is this 555-3178?” God asked.
“No, this is 555-7138.”
“Sorry.” And God hung up.
The chapter opened with:
Sometimes ideas have come out of short stories or ramblings I write just to shift gears once in a while. Cartoons are, after all, little stories themselves, frozen at an interesting point in time. What follows are several stories that either led to cartoons, could have led to cartoons, or were just ideas in and of themselves.
Interesting that this seems to have been published after its inclusion in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prehistory_of_The_Far_Side. Or maybe they just forgot to include the resulting comic. Some of the other short stories have the resulting comic included.
It’s a play on the term “La-Z-Boy”. The name comes from people being able to be lazy in it, but the joke is that the chair itself is no longer lazy.
There’s a quote I can’t find the source for, but is along the lines of “If you want to punish a cartoonist, give him daily syndication”
The coloring made it a little weird because it just looks unfinished. Here’s a B&W version that makes it IMO a little clearer:
I see now in the colored version that it’s supposed to be red at the end of the neck, but I thought that was the bottom part of the head. It looks like they redrew it a bit while coloring.
EDIT: Turned it into a comparison gif:
Some background on this comic:
Sketch Caption:
Mountain Businessmen
Transcript:
I just started thinking about mountain men and the wild frontier and Jeremiah Johnson and before long out came Seymour.
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
For me, the caption (if there is one) and the drawing are a simultaneous concept. In this case, however, I knew these bears would be pretty excited about their “find” but it took some time to decide how best to express it.
Yeah, turns out a lot of companies don’t really think about security, here’s a DEF CON talk where they find stuff that chokes on it:
Just in case it’s confusing, this was posted with today’s date because there’s no good way to automatically know the original posting date
That sort of exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
8·26 days agoWhat is best in life?
Some context on this comic:
Transcript:
This is perhaps a good example of how I’ll break a mental block (other than getting out my contract and rereading it). I scribbled out this strange little street musician, hoping to get something happening. It started me thinking about mimes, jugglers, and other street performers―and the possibility of other professions moving into the same scene.
The worm was playing drums, which was loud enough to attract a bird
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
The Far Side and Dennis the Menace used to be side by side in the Dayton Daily News. One day, back in August of 1981, someone “accidentally” switched their captions. What’s most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.
It was Ratatouille
Here’s Larson talking about that:
Transcript:
In my hometown, The Far Side is carried by the Seattle Times, which “crops” the cartoon so that it fits a little better on their comic page.
On the day this cartoon was published, friends started calling me for an explanation as to its meaning. I hadn’t seen the cartoon myself (other than when I had drawn and submitted it weeks before) and the conversations sort of went in circles before I got a few clues that something was amiss
I opened the newspaper to the comic section and discovered that someone, in order to compress the cartoon’s size, had chopped off a rather vital part of the humor.
The newspaper ran a correction the following day but, all in all, it’s sort of nice for a change when no one understands one of my cartoons but it’s not my fault.
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
I’ve always been drawn to swamps and wetlands and the things that live there. In those places, I find myself mostly looking downward for frogs, fish, salamanders, or whatever.
I think if I ever lived in feudal times and stormed past a castle gate, I’d have to check out the moat on the way across.
I suppose I like this cartoon not only for the suggestion that the usual crocodiles have been replaced with goldfish, but because that’s me yelling on the bridge.
Some background on this comic:
Transcript: