Gary Larson’s The Far Side Is Returning — With New Panels
Believe it or not, it wasn’t legally possible to read iconic comic strip The Far Side online until yesterday. Cartoonist Gary Larson forbade Web distribution of his classic newspaper strip and wrote an open letter to fans asking them not to post any of his cartoons. (It didn’t work.) Running from 1980 through 1995, The Far Side was one of the most popular strips of its day, appearing in nearly two thousand newspapers at its peak. Conceived under the name Nature’s Way, the animal kingdom was a frequent subject of Larson satire, though he would often make fun of anything that crossed his mind. Cows in particular. Larson would turn out to be the first member of the Trifecta of Newspaper Comics Defections in 1996, quitting The Far Side one day before New Years. Berkeley Breathed and Bill Watterson would follow before another year had passed, and the funnies never completely recovered from the loss. In 2015 Breathed discovered the modern invention of social media and used it to launch