Gary Larson

Gary Larson is an American cartoonist whose single-panel strip The Far Side turned science, animals, suburban anxiety and ordinary human stupidity into one of the most recognisable comic languages of the late twentieth century. Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1950, Larson studied communications rather than art and carried a lifelong fascination with biology and natural history into his cartoons.

The Far Side ran from 1980 to 1995, placing cows, insects, scientists, cavemen and bewildered middle-class figures in situations governed by dream logic and very precise absurdity. Its humour was concise enough for a newspaper panel but strange enough to develop its own vocabulary; even scientific culture absorbed it, with the word “thagomizer,” coined in a Larson cartoon for a stegosaurus’s tail spikes, later adopted informally by palaeontologists.