The cartoonist Gary Larson has finally agreed to create an official online home for his classic one-panel strip The Far Side, setting off a wave of nostalgia among Generation X-ers. These could almost be defined as the people who grew up surrounded by newspaper comics sleeping in bedrooms filled with Garfield paperbacks, then taking their first jobs in offices where every cubicle had Larson favourites or Dilberts tacked to the wall. And then we watched a life-defining artistic medium drop dead with unusual, heartbreaking finality.

Larson, the perfecter of the one-panel form, quit the business at the end of 1994, still at the top of his game. Bill Watterson, a completely different sort of artist, put Calvin & Hobbes to bed for good on Dec. 31, 1995. Other similar things happened at around the same time 1995 was also the year that Berkeley Breathed dropped Outland, giving up the doomed effort to turn his Doonesbury ripoff into an arty weekend strip. But the double blow of Larson and Watterson quitting was the real trauma for readers who could recognize purity of intention in an artist. It almost seemed conspiratorial, like the strike in Atlas Shrugged creators cruelly abandoning a world of consumers who had not recognized their dependence.

The double blow of Larson and Watterson quitting was the real trauma for readers

The people who still make newspaper comics today perhaps look at their legions of fans and their paycheques and tell themselves they are part of a living tradition. Obviously, at their best, they do wonderful work (although Olivia Jaimess Nancy is the only reason for this sentence to be here). But they must know in their innermost hearts that they are metaphorically surrounded, like Anglo-Saxons looking at the Roman ruins in conquered Britain, by irreproducible works of departed giants. No, your one-panel gag strip isnt going to be as consistently devastating as The Far Side; no, your strip about a bratty kid or animal isnt going to be Calvin & Hobbes.

If you work for a newspaper, its illuminating to think about Larson and Watterson as representing distinct sub-media within the comics page, itself a sub-medium of the overall newspaper. Visually, The Far Side could politely be called colloquial, while Calvin & Hobbes is painterly. Yet Larson, as he points out in an introduction to his new website, took great care with his art. His drawings are funny in themselves, which is not true of the great majority of newspaper strips (as you will find pretty quickly if you apply it as a test of them). The quality of modern screens is a big reason, Larson says, that he has been able to make peace with the internet.

Calvin & Hobbes has continuity in the form of running gags, although the characters could not evolve over the life of the strip. Larsons Far Side, which I guess we are bound to think of as existing on a slightly less ambitious artistic level, succeeded in maintaining a fantastic level of quality without having recourse to recurring specific characters (although obviously there were generic ones such as improbably sentient cow.) Every Far Side panel had to build the whole world in which it was set.Which is daunting, if you consider it from the creative side. And while the drawing perhaps only had to be good enough, the captions of Far Side panels reward close study. No writer has to work as hard as Larson did getting the most out of every adjective and comma, every Dang! or Ill be!In short, The Far Side is the ultimate pinnacle of the one-panel form, as Calvin & Hobbes is of the better-crafted imaginative sequential strip. These are the ends of parallel tracks that run back to the beginning of newspaper comics, and indeed past it. That they stopped at almost the same moment is probably not quite a coincidence.

Both comics were produced to the same deadlines, yet they continue to find admirers among those who are perhaps destined to live in a world without any creative media truly produced on deadline at all. Pop musicians, one recalls, used to be positively required to generate a hit single every few months; this fact of life was forgotten long before the year 2000, but would anyone argue that pop music is now the better for it? Similarly, Larson and Watterson could have, in theory, gone on past 1995 issuing new work only between hard covers. But while everyone subject to a deadline despises its torturous distortion of his life, all such people know equally well that there is no replacement for a deadline.

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Colby Cosh: Improbably sentient cow: The Far Side's 'return' only reminds of its departure - National Post