A Practical Guide to Finding and Understanding Gary Larson's Early Work
The Far Side launched in 1980 and became one of the most influential comic strips of the late twentieth century. But the work that came before it is scattered across dusty magazine issues, out-of-print anthologies, and a few digital archives that are harder to navigate than most people realize. I spent a significant chunk of time tracking down material from what some call the Prehistory Of The Far Side, and I can tell you it is not straightforward. Larson began drawing seriously while he was in high school in Issaquah, Washington. His first published work appeared in the school newspaper. From there he enrolled at Western Washington State College, where he contributed to the student humor magazine and started building a body of work that was already showing the strange creature designs and cosmic dread that would define his later career. He also worked for a short time at a geological survey, which explains the frequent paleontological themes in his output.
Where to find the early material
The most important collection of pre-Far Side work lives in Eerie magazine. Larson contributed numerous cartoons to the heavy metal horror publication starting around 1974. These pieces ran through the mid-1970s and represent roughly three years of his development before he moved into other outlets. Each issue had between twelve and twenty pages of cartoon content, and Larson's appearances were spread across them, sometimes sharing a page with artists like Rick Griffin and Michael Wm. Kaluta. After Eerie, he submitted to the Eastside Illustrated, a Seattle-based alternative weekly that published humor and art. This is where he developed the voice that would eventually lead to Washington Randoms, a syndicated strip that ran from 1976 to 1980 on about eighty newspapers before the network folded. The Washington Randoms material exists in reprints now, but the original strips from those four years are the direct bridge between his college work and The Far Side. For people who want physical copies, the most reliable route is searching for Eerie issues on eBay or through ComicLink. Issue numbers 17 through 30 contain the bulk of his contributions. Expect to pay between fifteen and sixty dollars per issue depending on condition. The complete run is probably two hundred dollars or more if you are assembling it in fine shape. A single copy of Eerie #23 from 1976 has twelve Larson cartoons, and that particular collection shows him working through the dinosaur jokes and alien encounter templates he would refine for years after.
The download question
There is no official digital archive from Gary Larson himself, and no publisher has released a comprehensive scanned collection of his Eerie work. You will find people offering PDFs on various forums and file-sharing sites, but these are typically scans made by individuals from their personal copies. The quality varies wildly. I encountered a set that looked decent at first but turned out to have several pages missing in the middle, probably because the scanner gave up when the magazine binding got too thick. I ended up buying the physical copies instead. The ones I located were in fair to good condition from sellers in California and Ohio, and they cost about forty dollars combined shipping included. If you do use a downloaded scan, open it in an image viewer that supports metadata inspection. Some of these files have been compressed so heavily that the smaller cartoons become illegible, and the detail that matters in Larson's linework goes away completely. I ran into this with a set labeled "high resolution" where the actual pixel dimensions were only about eight hundred pixels wide. You need at least fifteen hundred pixels to see the fine cross-hatching he used in the background creatures.
What to look for and what to skip
The early work is uneven. Some of the Eerie cartoons from 1974 are still quite rough, showing clear influence from artists like Robert Crumb and Harvey Kurtzman without having found their own direction yet. By 1976, the style solidified significantly. The compositions became more deliberate, the biological accuracy in the dinosaur drawings improved, and the single-panel format that defined The Far Side started appearing consistently. A useful comparison exercise is to place a 1974 Eerie cartoon next to a 1981 Far Side panel. The structural similarity is often striking. The misdirection technique, the deadpan delivery, and the preference for depicting impossible biology as mundane are all present in the earlier work. The main difference is that the pre-Far Side pieces sometimes felt like exercises in darkness rather than fully formed observations about existence. That shift happened between the last Washington Randoms strip in early 1980 and the first Far Side appearance in May of that year.
Pitfalls that waste time
Many people start by searching for "Gary Larson early cartoons" and end up on fan sites that rehost the same six or seven images that have circulated since the late nineties. Those sites usually do not include the Eerie work because copyright holders have been aggressive about takedowns. The material that actually matters is harder to find precisely because it was published in horror magazines that nobody preserves systematically anymore. Another issue is misattribution. Several websites label cartoons as "early Far Side" that are actually from Park Service Tales, the anthology Larson published in 1989, or Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the 1991 follow-up. The prehistory period is strictly pre-1980. Everything after that is already Far Side territory, even if it appeared in book form later.
Supplementary reading that helps
The book Take Bees: The Art and Antics of Gary Larson by Kim Deitch and Tom Spurgeon includes a small gallery of early work and interviews with people who worked alongside Larson at Eerie and in the Seattle art scene. It is not exhaustive but it provides context that the cartoons alone do not. There is also a 2009 documentary called The Far Side phenomenon that covers his college years and early career, though the runtime is tight on that section and it moves quickly through the pre-1980 material. I once tried to build a complete chronological list of every Larson cartoon from 1974 to 1979 for a personal reference project. I managed to catalog about one hundred and eighty pieces, but there are likely dozens more that appeared in smaller publications or local exhibitions that I never located. The record is incomplete, and anyone claiming otherwise is probably repeating information from a single fan-maintained database without independent verification.
What actually counts as Prehistory Of The Far Side
The period runs from roughly 1972, when Larson began submitting work professionally, through April 1980, when The Far Side debuted in select newspapers. That is about eight years of output spread across Eerie, Eastside Illustrated, Washington Randoms, and a handful of other small press appearances. The total volume is probably three hundred to five hundred individual cartoons if you count every published piece, though only about two hundred of those are easily accessible now. The remaining material is sitting in people's attics, in library microfilm collections, or in boxes at the University of Washington Special Collections where Larson's college-era work may or may not have been archived properly. I have seen references to a box of his student newspapers from Western Washington State College but could not verify the current location through any public source. If you are serious about this material, contacting the university archives directly and asking about any holdings related to Larson or Eastside Illustrated is probably the most productive step available.
