
New Stuff - Shared404
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff
======
binarymax
Wonderful news! Gary Larson has always been my favorite cartoonist. Hilarious
visual puns that teeter between dark and light humor so eloquently in a single
pane. Really looking forward to more, thanks for coming back Gary! (...now I’m
off to slip Bill Watterson a tablet and stylus and see if we can get some new
C&H :)

~~~
magicnubs
> (...now I’m off to slip Bill Watterson a tablet and stylus and see if we can
> get some new C&H :)

Now I'm imagining Bill Watterson's take on Cyanide and Happiness

~~~
Shared404
I started making an edit of that, then I died inside and decided not to.

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Rebelgecko
I think I actually enjoyed the prose before the comics more than the comics
themselves (although the first one got a good laugh out of me). Definitely
glad he's back and I'm looking forward to more.

It's interesting to see the new art style. It's neat how much more detailed
the comics are. The coloring is a bit more smudgy looking, if that makes
sense? IIRC he didn't color his own comics before so I suppose it's not a
surprise that they're different.

~~~
egypturnash
It's clearly a very different process, the old comics were colored in the
largely pre-digital world so it would have been a matter of him handing a B&W
image to the syndicate, who then colored it by laying down a very limited set
of flat tones. Probably by cutting out bits of zipatone and manually making
the cyan/magenta/yellow plates after a quick watercolor sketch of what colors
they wanted. The strip ended in 1995, when Photoshop was version 3. Not CS3,
that's actually v10. Version 3. Distributed on floppies.

The new ones are very much My First Digital Painting; you can see him
experimenting with leaving the ink lines behind in the taxi and cub scout
pieces, but keeping them in the alien piece. He's got a lot of tools to get
the hang of before he settles down into a regular style, if he ever does -
dude's seventy years old and retired, he ain't gotta treat this as more than a
hobby if he doesn't want to IMHO.

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vz8
I rarely look into my side mirror without thinking "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE
CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR."

Thanks, Mr. Larson.

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anyfoo
That very first taxi joke (I won't spoil it for you) made me happy. I had to
dwell on the comic, make up a small world in my mind where that situation
could possibly make sense, and just generally revel in the absurdity of it.
Glad he's back!

~~~
grecy
... I.... I don't get it.

~~~
dbmikus
Taxidermy is when you stuff dead animals. The man is hailing a taxi. Play on
words.

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hirundo
Thank Zeus he's back. But "Bears Eating Cub Scouts"? Is there a joke in there
that I'm missing?

~~~
slg
I loved reading Far Side as a kid. But my reaction to probably 10% of them was
"I don't know if I am too dumb to get the joke or the joke is too dumb for me
to recognize it as a joke."

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santraginean
Speaking for myself, I definitely had some instances of the former. But I was
relieved to learn years later than "Cow Tools" was an instance of the latter.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
Hum, never seen that one until I just searched for it. Agreed, it's too dumb
for me to get.

Anyway, here's the pic alone
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Cow_Tools_car...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Cow_Tools_cartoon.png)

And here's the wiki article it's in, with explanation, such as it is
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools)

Unrelated, look up the wiki article for Thagomizer. It's funny and show life
following art (Q: are Larson's comics art? A: yes.)

Edit: save you the effort
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer)

~~~
mercer
I'd say, with the utmost respect for Larson, that this isn't so much one
you're too dumb to get as it is a rare flub in his impressive oeuvre!

For me this comic combined with the general limitations of what he does are
what make him second to Bill Watterson. Somehow Watterson managed to be much
broader and yet as far as I know there's not a single flub in any of his
Calvin & Hobbes comics.

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blunte
The Far Side was an exceptional "comic". It wonderfully illustrated how much
could be conveyed with so little visual representation (and nothing else). I
truly enjoyed all of it over the years... I actually owned half a dozen or
more physical books!

I greatly enjoy reading Gary Larson's explanation of his mentality that led
him to where he is now... and I find it particularly amusing that he used so
many words to express his thoughts! His cartoons were bereft of words, but
they still conveyed so much meaning :)

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ceocoder
Now if Bill Watterson comes out of retirement and starts drawing Calvin and
Hobbes again that’d make everyday just a little bit better.

A fan made Hobbes and Bacon
[https://imgur.com/gallery/tUzAL](https://imgur.com/gallery/tUzAL) usually fan
art never measures up to the original but this is that exception to the rule.
It choked me up a bit to see Hobbes play with Bacon - Calvin’s little
daughter.

~~~
egypturnash
Dana Simpson is not Bill Watterson and _Phoebe And Her Unicorn_ is not _Calvin
And Hobbes_ , but when Dana started syndication, Universal gave her a copy of
the complete C&H, and she still suspects it may have been a not-so-subtle hint
that they expected her to fill those shoes. P&HU has a similar dynamic of
"smart kid with a magical animal companion", and an artist who refuses to bow
down to the ultra-simplified styles so many strips adopt to work at the
miniscule sizes a lot of papers want to squeeze them into.

Perhaps it will make every day a little bit better.
[https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-
unicorn](https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn)

~~~
klipt
She also created the excellent Ozy and Millie:
[https://ozyandmillie.org/comic/ozy-and-
millie-787/](https://ozyandmillie.org/comic/ozy-and-millie-787/)

 _If you 're going to San Francisco_

 _Be sure to wear some flour in your hair_

~~~
Sniffnoy
Oh, that makes a lot of sense! Ozy and Millie always reminded me heavily of
Calvin and Hobbes. Hadn't heard of Phoebe and Her Unicorn before; may have to
check it out.

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alexmingoia
I’m glad he’s producing new comics. I’ll admit I prefer his pre-digital style,
but I’m happy to see how his comics change without deadlines or being beholden
to editors.

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andness
This is amazing. I loved The Far Side as a kid, and for the last year or so my
son and I have switched from me reading books to him, to him reading Calvin
and Hobbes and The Far Side to me. The Far Side is by far is favourite, I
can't wait to tell him this!

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9nGQluzmnq3M
I've always liked Far Side and I think he has his hand-drawn style pat, but
the new tablet-drawn ones look... distractingly amateurish, for lack of a
better word.

Exhibit A: the faces of the drivers in the "taxidermist" gag, which are all
soggy blurs. I'm sure this is to some extent intentional to avoid drawing too
much attention to these peripheral features, but still:
[https://imgur.com/a/k9ZLv5s](https://imgur.com/a/k9ZLv5s)

That said, it's obviously a new medium for him, so I hope he keeps at it and
works out what his new digital style can be.

~~~
acqq
> I'm sure this is to some extent intentional to avoid drawing too much
> attention to these peripheral features

Yes. The goal is the opposite of not having that blurred.

If you expected something else... it's not him, it's you, expecting the hard
_lines_ over which the watercolor is applied. This is simply not that.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
In the same image, the pedestrians up top _do_ have crisply drawn features,
which (IMHO) look much better.

Maybe it's my fault for having grown up with Tintin-style ligne claire:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_claire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_claire)

~~~
acqq
> In the same image, the pedestrians up top do have crisply drawn features

The are supposed to have them, in order to match the figure where the joke is.

Larson jokes are in big part visual jokes: he draws intentionally so that a
reader has to "look around" in the picture until he "gets it." And that is
what makes the "click" and that deep "ooooh" effect.

For that to function the "level of attention" has to be "manipulated". The
cars in the front are allowed to be "out of focus" but the part of the picture
"in focus" should not "give out" too soon the gag.

So the cartoon functions correctly, the "direction" inside of the cartoon is
brilliant. The cartoon is however, I admit, more "raw" than what would be
expected from some kinds of products (e.g. it's not something that would end
up being in an ad, for example, exactly because some people have some specific
expectations). But it's the real Larson and everything is where is should be.
And he also wrote that he's "just exploring, experimenting, and trying stuff."

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01100011
Somehow this feels like the glimmer of hope I needed in these dark times.

~~~
Shared404
That feeling is a non-negligible part of why I posted this.

I'm glad to know it's not just me.

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DoctorOW
I dunno how interested we as a community are in art styles but I have to say
that it's clear much more time went into drawing these. They are much more
detailed visually.

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mixmastamyk
This being hacker news I was hoping he'd talk about his gear a bit. Maybe we
could even help him out a bit since he wrote that he's still figuring it out.
:-D

~~~
gregorymichael
Agreed. But, I'd give 10:1 that he's using an iPad Pro + Pencil. Got one a few
months ago, have never drawn anything meaningful in my life, but the tools are
so good that I wanted to start.

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sitkack
This makes me so happy!

And at the same time, I started getting flashbacks of Dr Fun, a science themed
web comic that was always visible on some screen in our lab.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170905104949/http://ibiblio.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170905104949/http://ibiblio.org/Dave/ar00197.htm)

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teh_klev
"Cow Tools" had me in uncontrolled tears of laughter in a bookshop back in the
80's. I thought I was going to have to be carried out of the shop as did
everyone else. Larson always perfectly hit the funny spot in my brain, even
now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools)

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AlanSE
Does anyone have an idea of what the canonical tools for drawing are, which he
mentions in the link?

~~~
alphakappa
It's likely to be an iPad + Procreate.

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Shared404
Thanks for the title edit. I wasn't sure whether or not to include the
subtitle here.

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nickthegreek
Was anyone able to locate an RSS feed for the new stuff?

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impalallama
Printing these out to hang in the cubicle as I type

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dmerrick
What excellent news!

