Gary Larson
| Gary Larson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 14, 1950 Tacoma, Washington, U.S. |
| Occupation | Cartoonist (retired) |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | The Far Side |
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| Signature |  |
| Website | |
| TheFarSide.com | |
| Author | Gary Larson |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Gary Larson |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
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Publication date
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1998 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 42894109 |
Gary Larson (born August 14, 1950) is an American cartoonist. He is the creator of The Far Side, a single-panel cartoon series that was syndicated internationally to over 1,900 newspapers for fifteen years. The series ended with Larson's retirement on January 1, 1995. His twenty-three books of collected cartoons have combined sales of more than forty-five million copies.
Larson was born and raised in University Place, Washington, in suburban Tacoma, the son of Verner, a car salesman, and Doris, a secretary. He graduated from Curtis Senior High School in University Place and from Washington State University in Pullman with a degree in communications. During high school and college, he played jazz guitar and banjo.
Larson said his family has "a morbid sense of humor", and that he was influenced by the "paranoid" sense of humor of his older brother, Dan. Dan played pranks on Gary, for example by taking advantage of his fear of monsters under the bed by waiting in the closet for the right moment to pounce. Dan "scared the hell out of me" whenever he could, Gary said, but Dan also nurtured Gary's love of scientific knowledge. They caught animals in Puget Sound and placed them in terrariums in the basement, making a small desert ecosystem.
According to Larson in his anthology The Prehistory of the Far Side, he was working in a music store when he took a few days off, after finally realizing how much he hated his job. During that time, he decided to try cartooning. In 1976, he drew six cartoons and submitted them to Pacific Search (afterwards Pacific Northwest Magazine), a Seattle-based magazine. After contributing to another local Seattle paper, in 1979 Larson submitted his work to The Seattle Times. Under the title Nature's Way, his work was published weekly next to the Junior Jumble.
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