Legendary cartoonist Gary Larson, the creator of The Far Side, appears to have finally accepted a dark, disturbing truth: The internet exists.
Larson, whose beloved daily comic strip ran in papers for 15 years starting in 1980—firmly overlapping with the rise of the early Web—”is definitely still alive,” his website assures us. You might not have known this, however, if you were looking for a sanctioned destination for his cartoons online.
Up until now, that didn’t exist. For nearly two decades, the official website for The Far Side looked like the image below, more or less (courtesy of the Internet Archive). At one point, whoever had the keys to this cursed webpage awoke at the wheel and substituted mail-order tapes for DVDs. Maddening stuff.
Larson touched on his motives for largely avoiding the ‘net in the past (back when it was “a cute little Internet-ling, its cold, digital eyes just starting to open”), and explained his change of heart (as an artist weary of attempting to assert control over his work), in a letter published on his shiny, new site.
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