Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The Far Side


My last post celebrated one of my most well remembered '80s comics, Bloom County. But the 1980s were a great time for newspaper comics, and for a certain zippy oddball quirkiness that seemed to be present in culture. Bloom County was one example of this, but there were others too.  

The Far Side  was a single-panel comic that exhibited a wonderfully bizarre sense of humor. 



I'm not sure exactly how unusual The Far Side would seem today, but back in the '80s, they brought forth a refreshing sense of absurdity. 


Along with Bloom County, The Far Side was one of my daily "must reads" in the comic pages of the paper. And it was a comic that, seriously, once read, often remained in my mind for the rest of the day. It was one of the things that defined my teen years in the oddball colorful '80s, and it was one of the things that got me through my adolescence . . . the humor and the sense of absurdity about life and culture and reality.