liebowitz

The Gazette (Montreal)

January 7, 1995, Saturday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. I5

LENGTH: 1437 words

HEADLINE: A far-gone conclusion It's a nightmare: Far Side's Gary Larson retires

BYLINE: BRYAN WOOLLEY; DALLAS MORNING NEWS

DATELINE: DALLAS

BODY:

For years I suffered a recurring nightmare: I'm sitting in a college classroom, about to take a final exam in organic chemistry. Suddenly I realize: I haven't attended a single lecture in this course! I've never opened the textbook! I know nothing about the subject of this exam! And it's too late to drop the course!

Then I wake up in a sweat.

So one morning I see a cartoon in my newspaper: a classroom full of academic-looking people - professors, apparently - each holding a duck in his lap.

Another professor, standing before them on a stage, is holding a duck under his arm. But in the midst of the crowd of duck-holders is a man with large, panic-filled eyes.

The caption reads: "Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck."

A cartoon about my nightmare!

I laugh and laugh. Seeing my subconscious deep-night terror taken to such absurdity places the world and my life into a refreshingly bearable new perspective.

Uncomfortable elephant

Does the cartoon cure me of my recurring nightmare? Of course not. I still dream the thing about once a month. But now, when I wake up, I think of ducks.

And there's that other cartoon, captioned, "The elephant's nightmare": An elephant is seated at a grand piano on a stage before a large audience, his eyes bulging with fear. He's thinking: "What am I doing here? I can't play this thing! I'm a flutist, for crying out loud!"

I have that dream, too. I'm sitting at a piano on the stage at Ed Landreth Auditorium at Texas Christian University, a contestant in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Jackie Kennedy Onassis is in the audience. And I don't know how to play the piano!

I wake up thinking of elephants.

These are common nightmares. Many people have them. They're about the world we live in.

The world - the North American part of it - is divided into two parts: Those who attach clippings of Family Circus and Love Is and Peanuts to their bulletin boards and refrigerator doors, and those who hang up The Far Side.

The former group lives in the delusion that the world is a warm, fuzzy, safe, sweet-smelling place that makes sense; that people are good; that dogs and children are cute and harmless; that love conquers all; that right will prevail.

The latter group knows better. Our world - the real world - is full of terror and night sweats. Danger lurks just outside our peripheral vision, ready to pounce, and we're unprepared and helpless. It's a world not far from The Far Side, inhabited by scoundrels, bunglers, monsters, nerds, insects and cows, where evil and incompetence (an innocuous-looking form of evil) are determined to do us in.We know that, eventually, they will.

The only sane thing to do in the face of such a world is laugh.

Gary Larson has been helping us do that since Jan. 1, 1980, when The Far Side made its debut in the San Francisco Chronicle. A few months later, it wasoffered to other newspapers through syndication. Since then, The Far Side has run every day in as many as 1,900 newspapers. It has been translated into 17 languages. Larson's small cluster of followers has grown to multitudes. He has amassed a fortune from the sale of 19 Far Side books (28 million copies in print so far) and calendars, greeting cards, T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing imprints of his cartoons.

Oddly, he didn't grow up dreaming of being a cartoonist. He was clerking in a music store, he writes in The PreHistory of The Far Side, a sort of autobiography and apologia, when one day "the sky seemed to suddenly open up over my head and a throng of beautiful angels came flying down and swirled around me. In glorious, lilting tones, their voices rang out, 'You haaaaate your job, you haaaaate your job .' And then they left."

Larson took a couple of days off. Sitting at the kitchen table, pondering the angelic visitation, he began to draw. "I never studied art other than the required classes in grade school and junior high," he writes. "My love was science - specifically biology and, more specifically, when placed in a common jar, which of two organisms would devour the other."

From Larson's love of biology come the snakes, spiders, insects, crocodiles, gorillas, wolves, lions, deer, gazelles, fish, fleas, zebras, dinosaurs, amoebas, bears, penguins, slugs, elephants, sharks, whales, buffalo, aardvarks, butterflies, buzzards, earthworms, mammoths, porcupines and squids that inhabit The Far Side. And scientists have acknowledged him as one of their own. Larson's drawings of these uncute, uncuddly creatures have been exhibited at such scientific places as the Denver Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Ore.

Strigiphilus garylarsoni, a biting louse, was named in his honor.

There are domestic fauna in Larson's cartoons, too - dogs, cats, sheep, horses, ducks, chickens.

Pole-vaulting cow

And his trademark cows, which entered Larson's life in 1980, only a few months after The Far Side began. One day he drew a cartoon of a cow trying to pole vault, clotheslining herself on the bar. Nearby, a cat is playing a fiddle and saying to an onlooker: "We've still got a couple of years before we're ready for the moon."

"When I finished (drawing the cartoon)," Larson writes, "I sat back and stared at my little creation. Something moved me. This was more than just a cow - this was an entire career I was looking at."

People inhabit The Far Side, too - Neanderthals, Indians, cowboys, Tarzan, farmers, fishermen, housewives, the Lone Ranger, nerdy children, Dr. Frankenstein, hunters, medieval torturers, their victims, Captain Ahab, explorers in pith helmets and, of course, scientists in lab coats, one of whom is Albert Einstein. Satan appears from time to time. Also, space aliens and, occasionally, God.

Whatever their genus, species or planet of origin, all Far Side creatures behave pretty much alike. Whether as predator or as prey, their thoughts and actions are reprehensible, disgusting, incompetent or stupid. A family of Holsteins poses for a picture at the Grand Canyon. One calf holds up its hoof behind the head of the other.

Hide-saving steer

A bespectacled female gorilla (Far Side wives always wear ugly eyeglasses) is grooming her mate and accuses him: "Well, well - another blond hair.

Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" The guilty look on the male's face suggests he is.

A dog, sitting in front of his doghouse, reads a book titled 1001 Ways to Skin a Cat. A cat, perched in a nearby tree, reads a book titled Why Every Dog

Should be Euthanized.

A steer, sitting with a group of cowboys around a campfire, betrays his fellow kine, saying: "A few cattle are going to stray off in the morning, and tomorrow night a stampede is planned around midnight. Look, I gotta get back. Remember, when we reach Santa Fe, I ain't slaughtered."

The brave defenders of the Alamo are lined along the top of the wall, firing at the enemy. Below, a nerdish vendor peddles T-shirts imprinted: "I kicked

Santa Ana's butt at the Alamo." On his sign, the price has been slashed from $ 3.95 to $ 2.95 to $ 1.

Such a vision offends some people. Some call it bizarre. Some call it macabre. Some believe The Far Side warps the minds of our tender young. But for 15 years, millions of clear-eyed realists who know we really do live in a boa-constrictor-swallows-pig world have counted on Larson to provide us a prophylactic laugh before we take that dangerous step outside our doors each morning.

Now, since the beginning of the new year, it's over. No more Far Side in the paper. After a-cartoon-every-day deadlines for all those years, Larson says he's tired. He's hanging up his pen and ink while he's still at the top of his form.

But he's only 44. What will he do with the rest of his life? Being a recluse, Larson isn't saying. His syndicate says everybody wanted an interview with him, so he decided not to talk to anybody. Maybe he'll just watch TV. Maybe he'll go on drawing his creatures in secret and stash them in a cave for some future generation to find, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Maybe he'll open the restaurant that he once told a reporter he wanted to start. One that would serve nothing but cereal, and "You'd, like, have the special of the day be Rice Chex or something. And you'd offer a variety of milk from whole to 2 per cent to skim."

Well, Larson, whatever you're up to, have a great year. You've really screwed up ours.

I feel a nightmare coming on.

GRAPHIC: Rattlesnake as desk accessory? Who would it suit better than Gary Larson?

FILE PHOTOS Far Side's fans, like the characters, know that the real world is full of terror and night sweats.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: February 3, 1995