Nature's Way (comic strip)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (December 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
| Nature's Way | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Gary Larson |
| Current status / schedule | Ended |
| Launch date | 1976 |
| End Date | 1980 |
| Syndicate(s) | Pacific Search (1976–1976) Sumner News Review (1976–1979) Seattle Times (1979-1980) |
| Genre(s) | Humor, Satire |
Nature's Way is a little known cartoon drawn by Gary Larson in the late 1970s that started his career in cartooning. It eventually lead to The Far Side comic strip creation in 1980.
Contents |
[edit] History
Nature's Way began as 6 comic strips submitted to the Pacific Search, a local magazine in Seattle, by Larson as an attempt to get away from his job at a retail music store in 1976. He was paid $90 for the lot, which encouraged him to go on and continue to produce cartoons. He then began submitting his cartoons to a newspaper, The Sumner News-Review, once a week for $3 a cartoon. Unfortunately, this was very little money and his enthusiasm for it began to wane and he began to revert to his old way of life (non-cartoonist). It continued this way until 1979 when a reporter he had shown his work to got him published in The Seattle Times. It was published on a weekly basis with a payment of $15 per cartoon. Unfortunately, they decided to publish it right next to a children's crossword puzzle, and it began to draw some complaints. These were enough to get the strip canceled in 1980, just a few days after Larson got a contract with the San Francisco Chronicle for The Far Side, which jump-started his career. Eventually, the name got changed to The Far Side, though, in the words of Larson in his book, The Prehistory of the Far Side, "They could have called it Revenge of the Zucchini people for all I cared."
[edit] Cartoon style
[edit] Artistic
The artistic style of this strip had some similarities to its future brother, The Far Side. For instance, the people in the strips were often overweight. The facial structures in Nature's Way also tended to resemble those found in Far Side cartoons, as well as having the same one-panel structure as the The Far Side. However, many differences can be easily seen between the two. The primary difference was that the consistency in Nature's Way's art was not nearly as good. The way characters and settings were drawn often varied greatly from panel to panel. One of the major differences was the amount of detail put into the cartoon, especially regarding shading and body shape of both human and animal characters. This could simply be because he hadn't been drawing very long and hadn't yet accustomed himself to a certain style.
[edit] Humor
The humor in Nature's Way was often based on ironic settings, bizarre mistakes, plays on common phrases, anthropomorphic situations, and general oddities of nature. It had a tendency to be slightly more crude than The Far Side, an example of this being a rabbit with a severed human foot hanging around his neck for good luck.
