Say It Ain't So, Gary

摘要

Gone, just like that. this week with Gary Larson's retirement, his economically drawn, extravagantly imagined cartoon "The Far Side" has vanished from 1,900 newspapers and millions of lives. No more of those bullet-shaped people with bullet-shaped noses and crazed eyes (like Ping-Pong balls with dots in the center) attending Electric Chair Operators Night School. ("Sorry, Lamarr. Down and up real fast is incorrect.") No more disillusioned-looking animals (with the same eyes) reminiscing about where they were when they heard Bambi's mother was shot. What Garry Trudeau self-consciously labors to be, Larson just was: cartoonist to his generation. He sneaked a pothead sensibility—where The Twilight Zone meets the elephant joke—into the gray domain of Ann Landers, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Goren on Bridge and Sidney Omarr. Not only did he get away with it; he made his chronically disoriented creatures as familiar and cherished as Blondie, Nancy and Dick Tracy.