Is there a deeper meaning here?
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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The Far Side
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Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
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Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works
Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.
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Self awareness? They all go to a convention meeting, which usually is a place for people who share a common interest to talk and learn. And here everone is standing around but without the slightest indication that any kind of actual exchange/dialogue takes place. Which defies the idea of a convention, but they at least know they're part of the problem.
Good theory. How about the math problem theory?
Might be due to language / education differences but I don't think I've ever seen these names come up in math problems.
Hmm guess I do see like Bob and Alice most often…
These are very common names used for people in maths problems and such. That's how I read it anyway.
I really don't think it has anything to do with math. Remember, this cartoon was written for the general public.
You know how people say "if you ___, you're part of the problem"? I think the joke is that the people in the picture already know and believe that they're part of the problem, rather than needing to be told. Rather than doing anything about it, they seem to celebrate it. It's just kind of absurdist humor, nothing too deep.
Honestly, it hits different these days when a lot of right wing American politics is literally about celebrating being part of the problem. "Rolling coal" and such.
!!!
I think you’re onto it there! Thanks :)
I just took it to be saying were all part of the problem.
I think it’s a play on, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” And the artist is imagining a club full of people who were accused of being part of the problem.
I just realized something… does he ever draw non-white people?
Uh sorta. Cartoons like this generally just had black ink to work with unless utilizing color for a Sunday edition.
So shading is usually done as a series of black dots (as above) rather than a smooth tone. Empty areas can be shaded this way but it can be very obscuring to detailed areas like faces. A lot of B&W print comics are like that.
Hell one of my favorite web comics 20 odd years ago had nonwhite characters that you only really saw when he colored panels.
Thank you for explaining that but I just scrolled through and didn’t see a single non-white person.
Yeah, Franklin from Peanuts tended to be a bit difficult to read facially sometimes because of the shading. Watterson once said that black and white shading could be tricky since the eye, being lazy, was drawn to empty white space.
So often in black and white comics they just forgo skin tones, especially in a more simplistic style like Larson’s. If you look at Watterson’s art, for example, his Sunday strips do show some darker kids, but in the daily black & whites they’re generally all drawn ‘white’.
Also keep in mind that Larson is white, and so him making fun of black people probably wouldn’t go over well.
Just to note: Bill Watterson made Calvin and Hobbes. I think you're accurately referencing him with that statement, though Charles Schulz made Peanuts.
Yes, I know. I was referencing two different artists; one that did try to have their darker-skinned characters be that way even in black and white, vs one who didn’t because he was concerned about how the comic would read.
It wasn't clear from first glance, so cool: glad to hear it was of no mistake.
Nice find