It's All Gary Larson's (the Far Side) Fault
Rick London
Around 1986, I was a happy-go-lucky tv producer and playwright in Washington, D.C. I wore the gratuitous gray pinstripe suite and red or yellow power tie. I lived on Capital Hill, just a few blocks from the Smithsonian. I never went unless I had out-of-town guests.
Several friends called me one day with an invitation to see a Gary Larson Far Side exhibit at the Smithsonian. I didn't want to go. I was tired after a long day's work. They talked me into it.
Don't get me wrong, I loved and still love The Far Side, but at the end of the day I was usually exhausted and the though that went through my head was, "Why wait in a long line for an exhibit, when I can simply open the Washington Post the following day and see the cartoon?"
I could tell Julie and Beverly were not listening, soI got dressed. They picked me up and we at the museum within five minutes. The lines, though long, moved quickly and the exhibit was beyond my wildest imagination. The panel cartoons had been blown up onto 5 or 6 foot poster boards and were hanging from the ceiling. Many of them were some of my most memorable from the newspaper.
I was like a little kid in a candy store running from one cartoon to the next. I had seen almost all of them in the Washington Post. Suddenly I was a kid again and a happy camper.
Something inside me started going wrong. My nervers were twitching and I had trouble catching my breath. Could it have been a heart attack? I went home that night and cried, not knowing why at first.
I tossed and turned most the night, still wondering why I felt so sad. Then it hit me. When I had been a college student, in Dallas, at about age nineteen, I wrote close to a thousand offbeat single panel cartoons (this was in 1974), many of them in a similar spirit to The Far Side.
Rule number one: Never show your parents any lofty dreams no matter what your age, especially if they are full-blown business professionals. MY mom hated them and insisted my dong my homewwork first and then deciding. I did my homework but had already decided. I just didn't know how or when, only that it would somebady happen
I remembered sharing them with mom and her negative response, but, I remember thinking, "Even if Mom is not around, I would still be scared to launch such a project for fear that people had thought I lost it". It was then that I realized Gary Larson was not just a cartoonist but a brave pioneer in the world of print journalism.
A decade passed. I created Londons Times Cartoons with one other artist. several top illustrator and I continue writing and assigning the cartoons. to my team illustrators. The site has become the biggest of its kind on the Internet and certainly the most visited (nearly 5 million a year since 2005 when we began counting). Londons Times Carotons was founded in 1997, seven years after that Far Side exhibit.
In the movie "Field Of Dreams" Kevin Kosner says, "Build It And They Will Come." Though I found the line a bit arrogant, it turned out to be true. No hype, no pop up ads, just a site full of good humorous free content.
Rick London once considered himsself a failure in every apect of his life. Now he owns 8 e-stores and a main cartoon site of offbeat incredibly funny cartoons http://www.londonstimes.us) It's All Gary Larson's Fault
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