First order of business: A cool chap by the name of Christopher Mills sent me an e-mail in reply to Friday's entry, informing me about his upcoming mini-series from Ape Entertainment, "Perils of Planet X." It seems like it will be a snazzy sci-fi swashbuckling adventure tale. It also shortens to an awesome acronym: POPX. Look for it.

Second order of business: Archive link.

Third order of business: For the next few days, I'm going to talk about a slightly different form of sequential art: the newspaper comic strip. Entries have appeared before on cartoonists like Robb Armstrong and Bill Watterson, and I'm going to continue to extol the virtues of syndicated greatness and whatnot. Today's featured strip is one of the most popular of all time.

Fourth order of business: The actual post.

8/12/07

224. The Far Side

For sequential art, The Far Side isn't very... you know, sequential. It is, however, brilliant. Gary Larson's mad genius appeared for fifteen years in "Far Side" form before ending its run, and can now be found in roughly ten zillion collections, including a massive Complete Edition. And there's also the plethora of calendars. I'm pretty sure the one-day-at-a-time calendar was invented so that someone could put Far Side cartoons on it.

The panel-gag-strip relies on surreal and absurd humor, mostly, as Larson uses his simple cartooning style to showcase bizarre jokes ranging from the ridiculous to the morbid, including the ridiculously morbid and the morbidly ridiculous. He's also a fan of the inherent hilarity of the animal kingdom, especially cows and ducks. He also enjoys pointing out the blatant stupidity of man.

My favorite Far Side panel is probably the "murder at a butler convention" one, but I can't find the dang thing to share it with you. And lawyergators would eat me if I did.

Anyway, for more on the strip, hit up the Wiki or perhaps the Official Far Side Website.

Larson and his lawyers seem to particularly dislike the sharing of Far Side panels online. Hence, I'm wary of actually posting any, though I've got over a dozen sitting on my hard drive. To truly showcase the wonder that is the Far Side, though, it must be experienced. Seek out the collections. There were also two animated specials produced, which is neat. I've never seen them. Wonder how it translated into a different medium.