The big news on my radar today is the rather timid return of Gary Larson, creator of the bizarre single-panel comic The Far Side, which ran from 1980 to 1995 and has since become a welcome part of the American cultural fabric. I have mixed feelings about Larson's return. On the one hand, there's a happy, fan-service aspect to seeing a beloved trope from memory come back to life. On the other hand, the country has moved on, and our collective sense of humor has changed. Can a much older Larson (God, how old is he now?*) survive in today's aesthetic climate? This may, if anything, be a more fearsome form of climate change to deal with.
Well, whatever my doubts and misgivings might be, I'll be happy to visit Larson's official website and see his old cartoons along with his periodically generated new cartoons. I get the impression that he's not planning to match his output from his heyday; the man must be rich off his ass by now, so he can afford to take things at a slow pace, commensurate to his doddering years. Good luck, Gary. These cows're for you:
*Wikipedia says he's 69, so he's not that old.
Is it just me, or is the official site painfully slow? Crappy server, or hordes and hordes of people happy to see Larson back?
ReplyDeleteI saw complaints about the slowness of the site over at Instapundit. At a guess, it's the "Instalanche" that's causing problems.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, a fellow hiker mentioned Larson yesterday during our walk. Neither of us had heard the news of this return though. The guy said he had a book of Larson's cartoons that had been considered too over the top to publish in the newspaper back in the day. We speculated how his work would have been impacted by today's PC culture of "that's not funny!" Should be interesting to see if he chooses to push the envelope in our current environment.
ReplyDelete