It's All Gary Larson's (the Far Side) Fault
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by: RickLondon
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Word Count: 597
I loved my years of living on Capital Hill in Washington, D.C. I was your typical hippie-turned-yuppie. Still thought like a sixties, guy, dressed like an eighties one. I liked my paycheck more than a bag of pot or the Beatles White Album.
The phone rang about 3 p.m one Thursday. It was my two friends Julie and Beverly, originally from Mississippi like me, and now my neighbors on The Hill. I was being invited to a Far Side exhibit at the museum. I wanted to sleep. They talked me into going.
Don't misunderstand why I wanted to stay home, given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I loved and still love The Far Side, but at the end of the day I was usually exhausted and the though that went through my head was, "Why wait in a long line for an exhibit, when I can simply open the Post or Times any day of the week and there's The Far Side.
They were persistent and I got dressed. They picked me up and we were on our way. The lines, though long, moved quickly and the exhibit was beyond my wildest imagination. The panel cartoons had been blown up onto 5 or 6 foot poster boards and were hanging from the ceiling. Many of them were my favorites from the past.
I was like a little kid in a candy store running from one cartoon to the next. I had seen almost all of them in the Washington Post. Suddenly I was a kid again and a happy camper.
Suddenly a feeling came over me that I can't explain. It was an odd one and not very comfortable. Though I laughed and chatted with my friends about our favorites throughout the event, I remember the discomfort that I couldn't seem to shake.
I tossed and turned most the night, still wondering why I felt so sad. Then it hit me. When I had been a college student, in Dallas, at about age nineteen, I wrote close to a thousand offbeat single panel cartoons (this was in 1974), many of them in a similar spirit to The Far Side.
Rule number one: Never show your parents any lofty dreams no matter what your age, especially if they are full-blown business professionals. MY mom hated them and insisted my dong my homewwork first and then deciding. I did my homework but had already decided. I just didn't know how or when, only that it would somebady happen
I remembered sharing them with mom and her negative response, but, I remember thinking, "Even if Mom is not around, I would still be scared to launch such a project for fear that people had thought I lost it". It was then that I realized Gary Larson was not just a cartoonist but a brave pioneer in the world of print journalism.
Ten years later, I launched Londons Times Cartoons with one other artist. Since that time I have worked with numerous artists and I've continued writing and assigning the cartoons. The site has become the biggest of its kind on the Internet and certainly the most visited (over 8.9 million visitors since 2005 when we began counting). The cartoon itself is nearly 11 years old. We have seven cartoon merchandise stores.
In the movie "Field Of Dreams" Kevin Kosner says, "Build It And They Will Come." Though I found the line a bit arrogant, it turned out to be true. No hype, no pop up ads, just a site full of good humorous free content.
About the Author
Rick London once considered himsself a failure in every apect of his life. Now he owns 8 e-stores and a main cartoon site of offbeat incredibly funny cartoons It's All Gary Larson's Fault
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