The Far Side Gallery 2 [Paperback]

The secondFar Sidetreasury.

Copyright © 1986 FarWorks, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Far Side®,FarWorks, Inc.®, and theLarson® signature are registered trademarks of FarWorks, Inc. in certain countries.Gary Larson was born August 14, 1950, in Tacoma, Washington. Always drawn to nature, he and his older brother spent much of their youth exploring the woods and swamps of the Pacific Northwest, and the tidelands and waters of Puget Sound.

Though he loved to draw as a child, Larson didn’t formally study art, nor did he consider being a cartoonist. He graduated in 1972 from Washington State University with a degree in communications but took many classes in the sciences. In 1990, Larson received the Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award and was the centennial commencement speaker. His talk was titled “The Importance of Being Weird.” His interest in science was a frequent topic in many ofThe Far Side® cartoons, which he created for fifteen years, from January 1, 1980, to January 1, 1995.

In 1985, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco premiered a collection of four hundred of Larson’s originals inThe Far Side®of Scienceexhibit, which later traveled to science venues across North America, including the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. In 1988, Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent science writer and a member of the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology, dubbed Larson “the national humorist of natural history” in his foreword toThe Far Side®Gallery 3.

In another fitting tribute, the scientific community named a chewing louse after Larson (Strigiphilus garylarsoni), and paleontologists refer to the distinctive array of previously unnamed tail spikes on a stegosaurus as the “thagomizer,” thanks to one of his cartoons.
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