Gary Larson

• Born 1950-08-14

Larson was born and raised in University Place, Washington, in suburban Tacoma. He graduated from Curtis Senior High School in University Place and from Washington State University in Pullman with a degree in communications. During high school and college, he played jazz guitar and banjo. Larson said his family has "a morbid sense of humor", and that he was influenced by the "paranoid" sense of humor of his older brother, Dan. Dan played pranks on Gary, for example by waiting in the closet for the right moment to scare him whenever he could. They also caught animals in Puget Sound and placed them in terrariums in the basement. Larson notes in his anthology "The Prehistory of The Far Side", that he was working in a music store when he took a few days off, after realizing how much he hated his job. During that time, he decided to try cartooning. In 1976, he drew six cartoons and submitted them to Pacific Search (later Pacific Northwest Magazine), a Seattle-based magazine. After contributing to another local Seattle paper, in 1979 Larson submitted his work to The Seattle Times. Under the title "Nature's Way", his work was published weekly. To supplement his income, Larson worked for the Humane Society as a cruelty investigator. Larson decided that he could increase his income from cartooning by selling his strip to another newspaper. While on vacation in San Francisco, he pitched his work to the San Francisco Chronicle, who bought the strip and promoted it for syndication, renaming it "The Far Side". Its first appearance in the Chronicle was on January 1, 1980. He retired the strip on January 1, 1995, as he thought it was becoming repetitive.