Voice From The `Far Side': Gary Larson Opens Up About Retiring

Gary Larson knows when to say goodbye.

"You should always leave the party 10 minutes before you actually do," says Larson, who announced Oct. 3 that on Jan. 1 he will walk away from his hugely successful comic strip "The Far Side" after 15 years of bizarre and achingly funny installments.

"I just feel like the time is right," says Larson. "I don't want to let it become something that I've seen happen in some other cartoons, where they simply become little industries and the reason for having done it in the first place seems to have been buried somewhere."

Reserved and demure, Larson has seen his strip grow into popular lines of books, bestselling calendars, coffee mugs and greeting cards, not to mention the countless clippings that adorn refrigerators and bulletin boards worldwide. His exhibit of science-related cartoons has even appeared at the Smithsonian and now resides permanently at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Larson's latest venture into an alternative outlets is an upcoming CBS Halloween special titled "Tales From the Far Side." The half-hour animated program sees Larson's improbable characters through 10 vignettes of "Far Side" cartoons in settings that range from insects on airplanes to space aliens in the Old West.

"Its fairly experimental," he says. "The good news is that we didn't have a network looking over our shoulder telling us what to do. The bad news is that we didn't have a network looking over our shoulders telling us what to do.

"We were all like a bunch of mad scientists running around doing this thing and, as a result, I think its going to be a real mixed bag of strange things."

Strange is probably an understatement.

The animated piece, created at Vancouver's International Rocketship studios, has no dialogue and relies almost exclusively on sight gags, some less palatable than others. Scheduled to air Oct. 26, the special includes a tale of a bus load of zombies headed for the "Dead Ranch," where they proceed to enjoy a hearty meal at the "pancreas breakfast" while others roast brains on the campfire.

"It actually reminds me a lot of my daily work in the sense that there will probably be something there to offend someone, and to confuse and hopefully to laugh at. I made a career based on the big three," Larson says.

"What's happened to me has been so amazing. I've had 15 years of doing something I love, so it's been bittersweet. The letter I wrote to newspaper editors when I announced my retirement was actually melancholy. That's when it sort of hit me."

The reclusive Larson, 44, a graduate of Washington State University, lives with his wife in Seattle. He generally avoids the media and, in this case, apologized beforehand for being a "lousy interview" at his downtown office recently.

Larson, who may sometimes draw heat for crossing the line of good taste, is his own worst critic when it comes to the comedic quality of his work.

"I think one thing that's important to maintain is a sense of fear, always doubting yourself . . . a good dose of insecurity helps your work in some ways," he says. "I think I finally started to lose that fear and a few times I've drawn things that, in the past, I wouldn't have sent in. So it was a red flag to me that maybe I was sitting on my laurels a little bit."

In describing the odd nature of his artistic inspiration, Larson relies on simile. "You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again. It's like that.

"I just get silly inside my head and I start to think about something and in my head I start twisting it around, contorting it and envisioning it in different ways," he says.

Another one of Larson's growing interests is playing music, specifically jazz guitar. A self-described neophyte, Larson has gone as far as constructing a small-scale home studio and says he spends hours poring over complicated musical theories.

And while cartoons will always be in his blood, Larson admits that his departure from the daily grind of creating comics will allow him the time to pursue a new passion.

"I just love to play," he says. "All your problems are gone, you're immersed in another world. It was, in fact, another red flag that it was time for me to consider retiring, because I was spending so much time in the music studio instead of working."