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“The Far Side” Returns to a Weird World
- kingbirdy 6y agoNot sure why this article came out today, the new comics were released on the 7th. https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff
- ISL 6y agoNews need not be instantaneous.
- plumsempy 6y agoOlds?
- frutiger 6y agoIn case someone reading this doesn't know: the word "news" is literally the plural of "new". When you want to read about all the "new" things that are happening, you go and read the "news".
- greenmana 6y agoThat's sadly the expectation these days. It's not like a journalist finds something interesting and spends a week or two writing a piece about it. The "news" should be up immediately so everyone can find out about it as soon as possible with some easily digestable tldr style, as it happens by the minute zero content reporting that the social media brain lives for.
- sidlls 6y agoMeanwhile, simple food recipes are accompanied by narcissistic ramblings and videos that take a good 10 minutes to get past just to get to the point.
- ghaff 6y agoThere are tons of sites on the Internet that are just recipes if that's what you're looking for. Likewise don't go to The New Yorker and expect things laid out as a bulleted list.
- spanktheuser 6y agoBefore the internet devoured print, journalism segmented itself as follows: - daily newspapers, which rushed important news into print as fast as possible (multiple daily editions, “hold the presses”) - weekly news magazines, which focused on analysis of anything broadly newsworthy. - monthly special interest magazines which combined narrow focus with in-depth coverage (Foreign Affairs, Byte) Broadcast journalism largely copied the format - daily news (Walter Cronkite) and weekly analysis (60 Minutes, Face the Nation). The dominant low brow weekly print news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report) refused to change formats are are gone. The middle & high brow weekly magazines survived Slate and Salon just fine; we shall see what the likes of Vox and The Intercept and Pro Publica mean for their fate.
- Shared404 6y agoThis article doesn't seem like it's intended to be an announcement, more a discussion.
- beervirus 6y agoThe baffling part for me is that they don't even include a link to the new stuff.
- neap24 6y agoIn sixth grade, my entire class was obsessed with Far Side. Our teacher actually let us tape our favorite comics in two columns onto our school desks. I still remember the one about William Tell helped me answer a test question once.
- gerdesj 6y ago"Its creator, Gary Larson (no relation!), retired in 1995, after having been syndicated in more than nineteen hundred newspapers and selling more than forty million books." The Newyorker clearly cares a bit about grammar: "its" for ownership - no apostrophe. Then it goes a bit mad: an awkward comma between creator and Gary. There are multiple firing solutions here. You could go in with something like: "Gary Larson (no relation!) retired in 1995. He was ... etc ... I'm not asking for a return to the strictures of "Usage and Abusage" but I'd like to think that professional journalists are able to stick words on the page without them looking uncomfortable. Prose should flow. When you write it, why not read it back to yourself. [Cow holding a bow, wearing a 10 gallon hat and saying something unlikely to Rowland. Rowland is a chicken]
- ponker 6y agoI don’t think the sentence is awkward at all.
- zapzupnz 6y ago> Then it goes a bit mad: an awkward comma between creator and Gary That's not awkward at all. The comma separates "Gary Larson (no relation!)", a subordinate clause, from the main clause: "Its creator retired in 1995 […]". Edit: As jcfields so kindly pointed out, it's apposition. Specifically, it's the use of a restrictive appositive. To my eyes, the real awkward comma is the one after '1995'. However, The New Yorker is known to have its own, fairly specific punctuation style.
- spodek 6y agoNo mention of Calvin and Hobbes, which came out a few years later and made a comparable splash?
- spats1990 6y agoI'm extremely glad he's back. I'm sure some part of why my brain is the way it is in 2020 is due to reading old collections of Far Side cartoons as a kid. Some of them I didn't understand properly until years later, but others (like the all-time classic where the cows are in the field standing on their hind legs, until one cow yells "Car!", and they all stand on all fours until the car is past, or "when potato salad goes bad", or the "Llamas at home" one) are the kind of thing that goes straight into your little-kid psyche and stays there.
- arbuge 6y agoEven though he's active again now, which is great, I suspect the one about curiosity and the dead cats* will remain forever my favorite. This one on the other hand, might be oddly prescient in hindsight: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/423056958717553865/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/423056958717553865/ * "Notice all the computations, theoretical scribblings, and lab equipment, Norm. ... Yes, curiosity killed these cats."
- jedberg 6y agoI really hope he keeps making more, given the response to these first few comics. I grew up reading the Far Side in the newspaper every day. I remember the excitement of running out to get the paper to grab the comics before anyone else. Today I follow some comics on Instagram, which gives that same sort of excitement. I load up Instagram and among the pictures of my friends are some comics that I enjoy -- including one account that I'm sure is not legal but posts a Calvin and Hobbes comic every day. I'm not sure if I should feel bad following the account knowing it is probably being done without permission, but at the same time, it brings me daily joy, which is what Bill Watterson always said he wanted to do.
- wolco 6y agoIf you are not the copyright owner none of that should bother you. Without insider knowledge it could be from the artists sent from their own home.
- shuntress 6y agoThis is like telling someone at a pawn shop not to worry about whether what their buying was stolen. Maybe it won't affect any given transaction. But concern over the source of the products we consume is responsible and worth thinking about.
- dwighttk 6y agoI dunno about the Instagram account, but https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes posts Calvin and Hobbes comics legally.
- hairofadog 6y agoI'm a middle-aged (or depending on your perspective, SUPER OLD) guy. I had the good fortune to work with some bright young millennials at my last job, and we sometimes talked about pop culture. I really had a hard time conveying how subversive and groundbreaking Gary Larson and David Letterman were in their time. Their sensibilities are ubiquitous now and so if you grew up in the 2000’s it would be easy to look at them and say, what's the big deal? But at the time their absurdist humor felt rebellious, new, and important.
- audiometry 6y agoA permanent high school memory is returning from my job at McDonald’s around midnight. Was tired but turned on David Letterman. Voices were all dubbed over in Spanish, with English subtitles. No one onscreen acted unusual. I was dying to go to bed but stayed up till the end to hear the punch line or payoff. Then the show finished without a single reference to it. I was awestruck. I’ve never heard anyone remark about this — I wonder if I imagined this or it just didn’t shock/impress people like it did me.
- mynameishere 6y agoWait, some guy on youtube made the same comment seven years ago. Is this some absurd long-con of yours? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDBZpBgBsWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDBZpBgBsWI oh man. I remember coming home from my job at McDonald's (!) and this episode was playing. I was dead tired but stayed up to see how they'd finally stop the subtitling thing. They never did -- the kept it up throughout the show and never made a single mention of it. That made it 10x more hilarious. Wonder when this aired? must have been 1989 or 1990ish
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoEither way amazing
- tomcam 6y agoWhat impresses me is that you have an encyclopedic memory of comments found on relatively forgettable YouTube videos! Not being facetious here, but I have to say I’m gobsmacked.
- aaron695 6y agoThe Far Side, was internet humour before the internet. It abstracted higher than comics around it. But internet humour like all the internet has iterated and abstracted many times since. I think nostalgia will keep it going, but it's had it's day.
- User23 6y agoSpace Moose[1] and the Parking Lot Is Full[2] were two early internet comic strips that smashed through that. They still hold up well to this day, at least if you like transgressive subversive humor. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020205062518/http://spacemoose.com/archive.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20020205062518/http://spacemoose... [2] http://j.aufbix.org/plif/archive/archive.htm http://j.aufbix.org/plif/archive/archive.htm
- dang 6y agoRelated from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23765968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23765968
- chasd00 6y agoI found the madness unleashed by the "Cow tools" panel hilarious. No one got the joke and it generated so much confusion the strip made the news. Larson talks about it The Prehistory of The Far Side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools?wprov=sfla1
- m463 6y agoI never saw that one, and the controversy is hilarious. "Larson took the unusual step of issuing a press release, explaining the joke and apologizing for the confusion caused: The cartoon was intended to be an exercise in silliness. While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown in this cartoon. I regret that my fondness for cows, combined with an overactive imagination, may have carried me beyond what is comprehensible to the average Far Side reader. Larson further explained that he was inspired by the idea that tool use was the characteristic that separated mankind from the rest of the animal kingdom."
- chrisseaton 6y ago...but is his explanation genuine, or a further part of the joke? We can never know, as any further explanation could also be part of the joke...
- m463 6y agoIt also said: "Reflecting on the cartoon's reception, Larson suggested he had erred in making one of the tools resemble a saw, which misled many readers into believing that to understand the cartoon's message, they needed to decipher the identities of the other three tools." and that mirrored exactly my train of thought looking at the cartoon.
- Legogris 6y agoReminds me of every time I watched a David Lynch movie.
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- m463 6y agoI loved the far side and was sad to see it sort of evaporate. Also gone were Bloom County with the banana jr 6000 self-portable computer (looking like a macintosh with legs) and Monty Python. That said, we got futurama, xkcd and ... others? Anyone want to share some good sources humor (that aren't too dumbed-down?)
- ctdonath 6y agoBloom County made something of a return when one of the running gags became reality: Trump running for President. Berkeley Breathed couldn’t stay quiet/retired then.
- dhosek 6y agoNone of the Berke Breathed comebacks have done much for me. Outland was a flop that gradually morphed into Bloom County light, Opus never really hit and the current revival on Facebook is better but suffers from its platform and Facebook's algorithm choosing to hide it from the newsfeed most of the time.
- ghaff 6y agoI suppose it's unreasonable to expect a given cartoonist to have more than one truly transcendent comic strip in them and how far can you a take a particular style/set of characters/setting/etc.? Trudeau may have done the best job with Doonesbury by aging the characters. Something like xkcd stays pretty fresh too because it has such a wide range.
- jccalhoun 6y agoI always liked the human characters in Bloom County more than I liked Opus and Bill so when he focused more and more on them I found myself less and less interested.
- jqgatsby 6y agoThe artist has stopped updating it, unfortunately, but formalsweatpants.com has a certain farside-esque charm, in my opinion. Similar story with Perry Bible Fellowship. Not for kids though.
- tomcam 6y agoAs good as Larson is, and he’s superb, his style is strongly reminiscent of B. Kliban, who predated him[1]. Kliban was funnier, often X-rated, and infinitely more transgressive. While Kliban was famous for his innocuous cat cartoons the adult material is IMHO as gut-bustingly funny as it is obscene. https://www.gocomics.com/kliban/2012/03/19 https://www.gocomics.com/kliban/2012/03/19
- prvc 6y agoLarson credits Kliban among others as early influences in this interview https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/far-side-gary-larson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/far-side-gary-larson...
- o_____________o 6y agoCan you show some examples of Kliban being funnier? Genuine interest.
- tomcam 6y agoI only know them from books of his that are now out of print, such as Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Own Head.
- prvc 6y agoLooked at a haphazardly chosen sample of his work, spurred on by the above comment, but none came close to even Larson's worst, in my opinion.
- antod 6y agoI had no idea who was being talked about until I saw the reference to "Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Own Head". As a kid in the 70s/80s, my Dad had a bunch of those books. I still remember some of them too - like the man sitting across a restaurant table from a human sized blowfly saying to the waiter "... and some shit for my fly". I suppose you had to be there. I still much preferred The Far Side though.
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- prvc 6y agoThe New Yorker's convention regarding the use of the diaeresis is the Charles II of Spain of editorial guidelines.
- dhosek 6y agoAs an undergrad, thanks to TeX making the dieresis readily accessible, I was fond of its use. I remember someone commenting that my writing "coördinates" with a dieresis made him want to pronounce it as if he were Inspector Clouseau.
- 082349872349872 6y agoMy wife's fashion sense is put-together with a "Stilbruch." I guess I should ask her about it specifically, but I've always taken it to be fashion-punk, to "épater la bourgeoisie" by demonstrating that although it would be within one's means to match the entire ensemble, one is not so herd-bound as to actually do so. Compare sprezzatura.
- war1025 6y ago> the single-panel comic that débuted in 1980 and helped make the Reagan era more bearable Gotta get a good shot in at those dastardly Republicans I guess.
- hevelvarik 6y agoIt’s the Lord’s Prayer
- geocrasher 6y agoCow Tools
- bstar77 6y agoI'm a big Far Side fan, but I'm not liking the aesthetic of the new tablet medium. The shading in particular looks significantly inferior to the old water color works.
- Daub 6y agoTo me, this is a classic example of a change in medium renewing a creative individual’s creative drive. Similar examples from literature are legion. From Picassos move from painting to collage (giving us Cubism), to the Beatles employing the Sitar in Norwegian Wood.
- Biganon 6y agoRelated to the article's form more than its topic, but "has humbly reëmerged, wanting to reëngage": I'm used to seeing "trémas" in French used for the very purpose of avoiding the usual sound made by two neighboring letters, but I didn't know it was a thing in English.
- jaggederest 6y agoIt's a bit archaic, and unusual in places besides the New Yorker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English
- biztos 6y agoOT but as a German-speaking reader of the New Yorker this abuse of the Umlaut has been making me irrationally angry for decades. But it’s a nice reminder that if you want to, I dunno, capitalize only the word “Dog” and end every sentence in a comma, you might want to own a magazine, Dog,
- pdw 6y agoThe diaeresis is unrelated to the umlaut though, it's a notation borrowed from old Greek. It never quite caught on in English, but it's part of the standard orthography of many other languages.
- elcapitan 6y agoLike French, where it's fairly typical.
- goto11 6y agoIt has nothing to do with a German umlaut. It is a diaeresis, and its use in English is perfectly valid (if uncommon). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English
- habi 6y agoI would love it if the far si(t/d)e had an RSS feed, that would make consumption so much easier.