‘The Far Side’ website adds new strips from Gary Larson

Larson has created three new strips for the site using, for the first time, a digital tablet.

It looks like the cows have finally come home — Gary Larson’s The Far Side website has unveil new work by the man himself.

Three new strips can be found on the site, but older fans of the Far Side may find them a bit … different than his previous work. Larson’s now using a digital tablet to create them, following some issues he had with a “clogged pen” while creating his annual Christmas card.

“The ‘New Stuff’ that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art,” Larson wrote on the site. “Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with ‘Cow tools.’ (Let’s not get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about improvisation, ‘You want to try and take people somewhere where they might not have been before.’ I think that my approach to cartooning was similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I was having fun.”

The website launched late last year, providing the first official online home for the comic strip, which debuted in 1979 and ran for about 16 years as a syndicated comic strip. Larson retired at the beginning of 1995, with his last strip appearing on Jan. 1 of that year.

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