JasonKoivu

Rereading...rereading...(snort)...rereading...(giggle)... Yup, these still hold up!

Part punny, part social commentary and part plain ol' silly for silly's sake, Gary Larson's one-off panels were a mainstay of the comics page in any U.S. newspaper back in the 1980s. For me, it was one of the few reasons worth turning to that section. Larson was actually saying something, at least part of the time, whereas most of the other strips had nothing to say and couldn't even wrangle up a laugh...unless you were the sort of person who spent your days pounding fenceposts into the ground with your forehead.

Like his entire body of work, not every one of the panels in Valley of the Far Side is a laugh riot. Occasionally you're left scratching your head, sometimes because you felt the breeze of something pass directly over it and sometimes because there's nothing much to get. I'm still not sure what, if any, deeper meaning makes King Kong landing on a poodle's owner funny, besides the fact that King Kong landed on a poodle's owner. If anyone knows the one I'm talking about and can explain it to me, please do! And then I will undoubtedly say... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q27YiPRiewg

Whereas some comic strips are nothing but sight gags with text to drive the point home to the truly stupid and some include illustrations with their heavy dose of text only because they're on the "funnies" page and feel obliged to have a drawing (I'm looking at you, Doonesbury!), usually Larson used the illustration and its caption symbiotically to generate the full laugh.

Larson always placed the caption at the bottom, which means the reader's eye is naturally drawn to the illustration first. I think on a few occasions it would've been better served to put the caption at the top: (See cartoon in link to this newspaper's site: http://news.nnyln.net/adirondack-enterprise/adirondack-enterprise-1985-january-april/adirondack-enterprise-1985-january-april%20-%200115.pdf)

Nonetheless, this collection from 1985 is a good 'un and still quite worth a revisit! My favorite being...