The Complete Far Side: Volume Two, 1987-1994

by Gary Larson

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

Gary Larson was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. His parents were Vern, a car salesman, and Doris, a secretary. He attended Curtis High School before attending Washington State University and graduated in 1972 with a degree in communications. In 1987, Larson married Toni Carmichael, an archaeologist.
Larson credits his older brother Dan for his "paranoid" sense of humor. Dan would pull countless pranks on Gary, taking advantage of his phobia of monsters under the bed by, for example, waiting in the closet for the right moment to pounce out at Gary. Dan is also credited with giving Gary his love of science. They caught animals in Puget Sound and placed them in terrariums in the basement; even making a small desert ecosystem, which their parents apparently did not mind. His adept use of snakes in his cartoons stems from his long-standing interest in herpetology.
Since retiring from the Far Side, Larson has occasionally done some cartooning work, such as magazine illustrations and promotional artwork for Far Side merchandise.
In 1998, Larson published his first post-Far Side book, There's a Hair in My Dirt!: A Worm's Story, an illustrated story with the unmistakable Far Side mindset.

Reviews

[Sam Lexow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real knee-slapper

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm going to repeat my review from Volume One:

While I still don't find them outright funny, they are certainly nostalgic. There were a number of them that I remembered from when I was much younger, but not too many in this collection (especially not amongst the earliest). Though, on this reading, I noticed a very disappointing pattern: all the people depicted fit into 3 groups: white "civilized" people, uncivilized cave people, and uncivilized Indigenous "savages" who are depicted as shirtless headhunters equipped with spears and arrows.

This pattern isn’t just outdated—it reinforces colonial stereotypes that reduce entire cultures to caricatures of primitivism. And while some might excuse that as a product of its time, the truth is those ideas were always harmful. It was never "okay back then" for the Indigenous children who were taken from their homes and forced to live in abusive residential schools that stripped them of their culture and identity. These comics have entertaining satire and amusingly absurd humour, but they also perpetuate prejudice.