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Summary: A Must-Have Book (if you like to laugh)!
Review: ...but was afraid to ask.Larson gives you an inside view into is wonderfully sick brain. From his rocky, struggling beginnings of being a starving cartoonist, to the monster he created, he spills all. Some of the highlights are the chapters on cartoons that his editor wouldn't allow to be published and his late-night sketchbook doodles. Along with his comments on the cartoons, he has complied a sort of "Greatest Hits" of his cartoons. This book never gets old. I'll pick it up every few months and be rolling on the floor with laughter every time.
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Summary: Intriguing close-up of the Far Side of Gary Larson
Review: A workmate showed me this book. I bought it the next day and have read it at least dozen times since then! The Far Side is the funniest comic I've ever seen. I base this upon how many times a comic makes me laugh outloud, and HOW loud. Gary Larsons books have done this far more frequently than any other! My favorite section is the "rejected" ones! If you like the Far Side, this book should be placed first on your shelf of Far Side books. I was keenly entertained by his little notes and comments of how he comes up with his ideas, and his sketchbook samples!
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Summary: Absolutely Hilarious
Review: For those of us in 'the biological realm'....who have a warped sense of humour...Larsen fits right in! My ultimate favourite....Tether Cat...for which he received soooo much flack for....and his response was....well you know...priceless!
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Summary: what a sick man
Review: Gary Larson created The Far Side comics and did so much for the world of comics. He broke taboos, he did disgusting things, he used intelligence with his wicked (and twisted) sense of humor. When you talk about the greatest cartoonists and strips you mention Garfield (old Garfield before Davis fielded out all the work), Calvin & Hobbes (which fits perfectly with Larson), and The Far Side (I'd also include the relatively new strip, Get Fuzzy). This book collects Larson's work, new work, and work he never showed. You have to see it to believe it, and it is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
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Summary: Read this book with your favorite cow, bug or fat kid
Review: How many books have you read so many times you don't even know how many times you've read them? How many books do you have that -- when you broke up with your ex girlfriend -- you got all your old Russian literature back but not them? Yeah sure, you can get another copy of this book for a few bucks, but it's the principle of the thing, isn't it? So, if SOMEONE who happens to be reading this is feeling guilty, they know how to get the book back to me. Or at least, just fax the part at the beginning where Larsen drew that picture of his family dog, or the page where Larsen drew the inside of the trunk, or the page where Larsen drew the snake after it ate...well let's just say it was next to any empty play pen or even the page where Larsen talked about his famous "cow tools" strip. Or you could just fax the whole thing.
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Summary: Read this book with your favorite cow, bug or fat kid
Review: How many books have you read so many times you don't even know how many times you've read them? How many books do you have that -- when you broke up with your ex girlfriend -- you got all your old Russian literature back but not them? Yeah sure, you can get another copy of this book for a few bucks, but it's the principle of the thing, isn't it? So, if SOMEONE who happens to be reading this is feeling guilty, they know how to get the book back to me. Or at least, just fax the part at the beginning where Larsen drew that picture of his family dog, or the page where Larsen drew the inside of the trunk, or the page where Larsen drew the snake after it ate...well let's just say it was next to any empty play pen or even the page where Larsen talked about his famous "cow tools" strip. Or you could just fax the whole thing.
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Summary: A 10th Anniversary Retrospective
Review: If you have ever wondered how Gary Larson started coming up with ideas for "The Far Side," this book offers a retrospective back to Gary's childhood days. The book is divided into five portions. The first portion takes Gary's past from his first drawings to syndication of "The Far Side." Along the path was a pre-Far Side comic called "Nature's Way."
In the second part of the book Gary offers his original sketches and captions in comparison to how the comics actually came out. In most cases the final version was better, but not always. At the end of this portion of the book is a short section titled "stories" that is what it says, comics with a lengthy caption that is at the very least a short story. In some cases the caption could be a novel, if you think about the concept very long, which I do not recommend. You might suffer further brain damage.
The third part is really interesting. It shows how Gary or newspapers made mistakes. The mistakes were often subtle, sometimes blatant. Some of the more interesting mistakes happened when the caption of adjacent comic was switched with that of "The Far Side."
The fourth portion of the book was humorous independent of the comics. Gary offers comments from various people offended by his art. Considering the art and the comments offered, I suggest that in many cases people saw something that was not there, which makes me wonder where THEIR mind was at. In other cases, people need to remember that Gary is offering a perspective on the world, in comparison to how people see things. It does not mean that Gary is interested in actually seeing the things in his comics happening; usually.
The fifth and last portion of the book offers Gary's favorites. I concur that most of them brought a smile to my face, and in a few cases an out right laugh.
Gary Larson succeeds in thinking outside the box, something that he does with great regularity. I suspect that he would be great at inventing. Of course, he is a self-described nerd, and I believe it. He also seems quite pleased that his comics find substantial popularity amongst scientists. Probably engineers too. If you think "The Far Side" is one of the greatest comics ever created, you will love this collection for its explanations. I recommend this collection highly for Far Side fans.
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Summary: Screamingly funny
Review: If you like the Far Side, you will naturally love this book. Besides being chock-full of Far Side comics, there are also sections with Larson's thoughts about specific cartoons, and a nice autobiography. But the funniest section is probably the rejected cartoons, pages of cartoons which were rejected, and the reasons why.
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Summary: A Must-Have Book (if you like to laugh)!
Review: Larson writes in his introduction: "What the reader will find herein is a collection of the Far Side's birth and evolution". He proves that by first showing us some of his drawings as a kid that even then show Larson as the warped genius he would become albeit without the subtlety his best work would display (IE: One of his childhood cartoon is of a boy being fangled over an alligator pit at the zoo by his father). From there, we fast forward to Larson's early adult life where he is working at a retail music store. One day he came to realize that his job was the pits and so he decided to try to break into the world of cartooning. He started out by drawing strips for small regional publications in the Pacific Northwest. Until 1979, when he began drawing Nature's Way for the Seattle Times. Nature's Way was the precursor to the Far Side and Larson feared that there might be trouble early on when he discovered that his strip, with its decidedly adult oriented humor, was placed next to Junior Jumble. A year later, Larson decided to try to expand his strip beyond one newspaper and went to San Francisco where he succeeded in placing it with the Chronicle. Ironically, one day after the strip was accepted, the Seattle times axed Nature's Way ("I knew it shouldn't have been next to Junior Jumble" Larson grouses). The strip is re-christened the Far Side and makes its debut a week later. Before long it appears in other newspapers. When Larson's contract expired in 1984, he moved to Universal Press Syndicate. From there, Larson proceeds to take us inside his creative process and show us what was going on in his mind when he drew his comics. We also get a tasty sampling of mistakes Larson made as well as mistake his editors made and a list of angry letters from readers furious about certain comics and strips that the syndicate decided not to publish. And lastly, there is a selection of some of Larson's favorite strips. You can pick up Prehistory Of The Far Side at any point and laugh your rear end off (even if you're not a horse). While we may miss the enjoyment of reading a new Far Side strip each day in our daily newspaper, we still have collections such as this one to remind us of the good times. Another Amazon quick-pick I recommend is the unusual and hilarious THE LOSERS CLUB by Richard Perez
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Summary: A Hilarious behind-the-scenes...
Review: This is a behind-the-scenes look at The Far Side. It amazes me how similar cartooning is to advertising, my profession, in terms of the process, the clients, the portfolio, the frustrations, etc. Includes early sketches of cartoons, changes that were made with rationale, and a hilarious section on reader complaints. Also has a chapter on mistakes, one of my favorites of which was when a newspaper accidentally swapped a Far Side caption with a Dennis the Menace caption. I was laying in bed reading it alone, and laughed so hard I started crying.
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