Known for taking a surreal but insightful attitude to nature, many of The Far Side‘s best comics extend this logic to dinosaurs. Indeed, Gary Larson’s dino-comics are so beloved, his term for a stegosaurus’ tail spikes was actually adopted by real-life scientists. However, dinosaurs also give Larson the chance to indulge The Far Side‘s tendency to go darker than its newspaper-comic peers.
Here, then, are the 10 darkest Far Side comics about dinosaurs, in which razor-toothed beasts and incoming extinction allow the comic to shed any semblance of Marmaduke-like purity and go for the jugular.
10 New Dinosaur Eggs
Two hapless archeologists are about to be met with a grim surprise when a mother T-Rex returns home to find them handling her newly hatched eggs. Typical to The Far Side‘s darkest jokes, the strip leaves much to the imagination, with the terrifying predator’s shadow looming over the two on-panel humans. Larson has talked before about the difficulties of fitting all the context for a joke into a single panel, and this comic is a great example of how he’s mastered the technique, with the shadow of the T-Rex giving readers vital context for what’s waiting just off-panel.
9 It’s Roughage
A carnivorous dinosaur warns his shocked friend in no uncertain terms that certain prey is no good, as an impassive ankylosaur saunters past unperturbed. One of The Far Side‘s best dark-humor tricks is to increase the self-awareness of predators while leaving their instincts intact. The quaint phrasing, subtle personality in the dinosaurs’ expressions, and minimalism of the composition all add to the core idea of making brutal predation a mundane part of life.
8 Dinosaurs Mock a Mammal
In a classic “bullies vs. nerd” dynamic, two dinosaurs stand guffawing at a goofy-looking primitive mammal, while a third looks on with concern as the first few snowflakes begin falling. It’s a comic that takes a little knowledge to appreciate – the time of the dinosaurs is at an end, and the small, furry animals are the ones who’ll actually survive the coming Ice Age. The joke gets darker the longer the reader sits with it – these three ‘bully’ dinosaurs may be about to get their just deserts, but in real terms, what that actually means is that they’re about to freeze to death.
Gary Larson has discussed in the past how The Far Side manages to evoke a specific type of dread in some readers because as a comic, it freezes a single moment in time. Any moment of violence lasts forever, still happening whenever the reader returns, and any impending danger is always just about to unfold. That idea makes this comic even bleaker, as three dinosaurs stand perpetually on the edge of extinction, with one just beginning to figure out how doomed they are.
7 Jurassic Calendars
The banality of modern existence is distilled into the timeless image of an early-morning X-ing off of the calendar, with the twist that, for a Tyrannosaur, each of their day’s tasks can be condensed into a variation of “kill something and eat it.” It’s another joke where vicious predation becomes mundane, but The Far Side‘s art deserves credit for two great touches. First, the comical use of the T-Rex’s tiny arms, and second, the brutish set of the eyes and mouth, which drive home the reality that a lot of innocent, presumably intelligent beings have been torn apart by this gigantic dinosaur.
6 Closer, Dug, Closer
In another example of The Far Side loading context into a single panel, the caveman Dug approaches a clearly undomesticated pteranodon, urged on by the owner… who on closer inspection has been absolutely savaged by his ‘pet.’ Again, there’s the promise of violence about to unfold, but also a certain degree of commentary on how irresponsible pet owners overestimate their animals despite all prior behavior. Perhaps the most ingenious part: the ambiguity as to whether or not the unnamed owner is attempting to trick Dug into injury, or is simply totally unable to predict what’s about to happen.
5 Since the Kids Are in Bed
A domestic scene between two bloodthirsty predators, with a dinosaur husband playfully suggesting an adventurous evening to his wife… of hunting down and devouring herbivores. This comic goes further than most in anthropomorphizing its subjects, as the dinosaurs gets newspapers, a tiny television, and even comical ’50s glasses. There’s something particularly dark about the more colloquial ‘planteaters,’ and the female T-Rex’s mismatched teeth create the image of a towering monster rather than just a prehistoric animal. It’s worth noting that in this case, The Far Side is actually lighter than reality. Prevailing theories state that male Tyrannosaurs didn’t stick around and play house with their ‘families’ – they were much more likely to eat their kids than put them to bed.
4 Humpty Dumpty
There are some Far Side comics that genuinely predicted (and likely shaped) the future of irreverent humor, and this famously absurdist Humpty Dumpty strip provides perhaps one of the best jokes in the entire run. There’s a genius juxtaposition between the expression of belligerence on the creature’s face and the joyful face on the shattered eggshell, and the double-weirdness of a world that has knights attending to a broken egg-man… but also contains dinosaurs. The strip answers a question most people never thought to ask – if Humpty Dumpty is a giant, living egg, what’s inside waiting to hatch? Of course, even this points to one of the most surreal facts in pop culture – nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty rhyme does it actually say he’s an egg.
3 Bobby Felt Very Alone
A tragic tale of an innocent, fun-loving dinosaur youth being confronted by the extinction of his clade. The Far Side often gets away with surprising darkness by dealing with cartoon animals, but here it’s hard to avoid the fact that the comic depicts a kid whose friends are all dead, and the unshakable implication that he’s next. Perhaps the best part of this strip, other than the implication of dinosaurs playing baseball, is that someone is writing and posting signs whenever another species of dinosaurs is wiped out.
2 Look Out, Thak!
The Far Side is as linguistically adventurous as it is visually surreal, and here plays with several fun ideas. First, that because the ‘pt’ of ‘pteranodon’ is silent when written down, it’s hard to pronounce for a caveman, second that scientific names coined in the 1800s stretch back into prehistory, and third – obviously – that humans and dinosaurs ever overlapped. The Far Side also picks the perfect moment in time, implying that the gigantic creature has somehow flown down so silently that Thak, who is facing towards it, didn’t notice its approach. Comics have the benefit of freezing each moment in time, and here The Far Side finds the perfect moment right after an impossible set-up, and right before grisly violence.
1 Mitch Loses a Dollar
When The Far Side has faced controversy, it’s almost always been by depicting moments that some readers took as animal cruelty. That’s surely the case here, as a T-Rex is kept trapped in a makeshift basement, used for entertainment by an owner who apparently invites his friends over to feed the poor creature random objects. However, the real darkness comes from the implication – not even part of the joke – that this situation has to end in tragedy for everyone involved.
The unfocused eyes of the T-Rex avoid The Far Side‘s usual humanization of predators, and it’s clearly a killing machine that the foolish owner hopes to keep under control with a simple rope and pulley. Things are made slightly darker by these being modern humans, rather than stock cavemen. This Far Side comic essentially revisits the same idea as Dug and the pteradon, but with a more bizarre setting that makes the darkness even more unsettling.
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