46 Years Later, The Far Side's Very First Comic Hits Like a Truck
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Published Mar 20, 2026, 8:01 AM EDT
Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor.
The Far Side'sdebut comic still hits 45+ years after it was published. But there's more to it than that. In fact, what if we told you that the inaugural Far Side panel actually holds the key to unlocking the entire series? Seriously. In a way, Gary Larson's whole creative project is outlined in the very first Far Side.
The Far Side's Off-Brand View Of Humanity Is On Full Display In Its First Ever Cartoon
First Published: January 1, 1980
The first Far Side cartoon features a couple of crabs hanging out on the beach, watching as two human toddlers build a sandcastle nearby. In the caption, one crab comments how, "[humans are] quite strange during the larval phase." What makes this a prototypical Far Side, and the perfect first panel? It all starts with its use of perspective.
Debuting in 1980, The Far Side quickly leaned into its boundary-pushing sense of humor; these early comics came closest to crossing the line.
The crabs are the POV character here. That's clear from the caption, but also from the comic's composition, with the crustacean characters in the foreground and the human young they're observing in the background. The kids' images are comedically distorted to portray them as "other." This use of animal characters to "other" humanity is The Far Side's defining feature.
Humanity was always Gary Larson's subject matter. Specifically, humanity's weirdness, which to Larson became obvious the moment one takes a step back and looks at humans from an outside perspective. The Far Side developed a few different approaches to doing this, but animal POVs were one of its most common refrains. That all started with comic #1.
The Far Side's Alien POV Helped Make It A Refreshing Addition To Newspaper Comic Pages
Gary Larson Made It Big By Making A Mockery Of Humanity
The Far Side is full of aliens for the same reason it's obsessed with animals. Author/artist Gary Larson was the ultimate outsider. The Far Side frequently featured observational humor, but Larson was like an observer who had just descended from outer space and discovered humanity. Endlessly fascinated, but also perplexed and horrified by what he was witnessing.
Whether he drew extraterrestrials, or common barnyard animals, Larson was always at least obliquely commenting on human behavior, customs, shortcomings, etc. That creative impulse traces back to Larson's pre-Far Side work, which is why it was already fully-formed when his cartoons were renamed The Far Side and launched in 1980.
The Far Side steadily grew in popularity in its early years, achieving nationwide success in the mid-80s; these early cartoons helped make it a hit.
The very first Far Side cartoon, with its distorted view of humans in their "larval stage," announces the comic's intentions, though that's only really clear in retrospect. At the time, readers opening the newspaper on January 1, 1980 and finding a panel featuring crabs making fun of babies would have just thought "what the heck is going on?"
The Far Side's Punk Rock Perspective Helped Make The Underground Mainstream In American Pop Culture
Gary Larson Got His Start In San Francisco Alongside The OG Punks
Outsider perspectives like The Far Side's have been added to America's cultural matrix over the past 45 years. But in '80, it paid a lot less to be weird, or unconventional. The first Far Side comic was published in the San Francisco Chronicle on New Year's Day 1980. Consider another landmark cultural shift happening at the same time and place.
That is, legendary Bay Area punks the Dead Kennedys were gearing up to record their debut LP, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Punk rock was just a few years old at this point, and it would be over a decade before it broke into the mainstream. The genre's '80s evolution ran in parallel to The Far Side's rise to success.
It's fair to say that The Far Side was a meeting point for underground and mainstream art that helped push pop culture forward. It brought a punk sensibility to a classic medium, and it increasingly infiltrated the mainstream as it became a sensation by the mid-1980s. The comic's strategy for success started with its initial cartoon, and The Far Side never looked back.
What do you think, Far Side fans? What other comics are essential to understanding Gary Larson's sense of humor?
English (US) ·