Speaking of hate mail, whats the deal with Doctor Fun and the Far Side?
I’ve got all those old Far Side collections, and whenever I need more ideas, I just pull them out and start copying. They’ve never caught me yet – oops! I think the Far Side is one of the funniest things ever, and was certainly an inspiration, but comparisons to the Far Side are a non-event. If you draw any kind of wacky one-panel comic, and anybody laughs at it, then somebody brings up the Far Side. You could go through a couple years of The New Yorker, pick out all the most Larsenesque cartoons, and create your own pseudo-Far Side collection. It is a certain flavor of humor. Gary Larsen made it his own, and kept it up longer and better than anybody else. I took a cartooning class once where one of the students drew nothing but ogres swinging decapitated babies around. The instructor thought this was wacky stuff, and kept exclaiming that Decapitron or whatever the guy called himself, was the next Gary Larsen. Go figure – that was the judgement of a bona fide New Yorker cartoonist. If
