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It's All Gary Larson's (the Far Side) Fault

Author: RickLondon
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Word Count: 572
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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 get me wrong, 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 Washington Post the following day and see the cartoon?"

The girls insisted I go with them. So I did. 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 Far Sides of all time.

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.

Then, in the middle of all this fun, my mood started to change. I started getting chills and feeling isolated and terrible. I could not pinpoint what was happening. I continued, I think, to be amused and act happy but all I wanted to do was go home and cry.

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

Publishing and newspaper syndication are a difficult business for cartoonists. Nedles to say, most do not get published.

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