Before Creating ‘The Far Side,’ Gary Larson Investigated Animal Cruelty

Gary Larson’s iconic comic strip The Far Side regularly featured a wide assortment of surprisingly intelligent animals, including snakes, bears, apes, cats, anteaters, and of course, cows — although Larson’s joke about their confounding tools didn’t go over so well. 

But before Larson was world famous for drawing animals, he made a living trying to help them. Back in the 1970s, the early incarnation of the comic strip that would eventually become The Far Side was known as Nature’s Way. Possibly because that title made the comic sound like a homeopathic laxative, Larson didn’t make a whole lot of money, just three bucks per cartoon. So, while living in Seattle, he got a day job working as an animal cruelty investigator for the Humane Society.

“It’s something I just fell into,” Larson said of his Humane Society job in a 1983 interview. “It paid the rent. I investigated complaints of cruelty.” In an odd turn of events, Larson landed the job immediately after inadvertently injuring an animal. “Strangely enough — and this is the only time in my life I’ve ever done this — on my way to the job interview, I ran over a dog. I recognize some irony in that,” Larson confessed. 

Bbecoming an animal mistreatment detective isn’t generally considered to be a pathway to a career in cartooning, but it somehow ended up working for Larson. While he was working on a case involving “pony abuse,” Larson met a reporter for The Seattle Times, who then “showed an editor some of Larson’s cartoons.” 

The paper picked up Nature’s Way, which eventually gave the future desktop calendar mogul the confidence to drive to San Francisco during a week-long vacation from the Humane Society and pitch his work to The San Francisco Chronicle. The trip was a success, but he returned home to find a letter from the Times editor informing him that they would no longer run Nature’s Way. “They said that there had been too many complaints,” Larson once recalled. “I didn’t realize I was working in a family medium.”

Looking back at those early cartoons, it sure seems like Larson’s anti-animal cruelty job informed some of the takes. Several of them involved jokes about animals getting their revenge on humans. Like the rabbit who wears a lucky human’s foot for luck.

Or the one in which a scuba diver collecting fish runs into a sea creature with a plastic bag full of scuba divers. 

And this sensibility was obviously present in The Far Side as well. In one particularly dark entry, a gang of angry cows get their “revenge” on “Farmer MacDougal and his wife” using an “auto milker,” which police later describe as “grisly, yet strangely hilarious.”

It’s unclear if Larson ever held any jobs that involved aliens or children who can’t properly open doors.