Some context on this comic:

Transcript:

In my first year or so of drawing The Far Side, I was scared to death of making mistakes in the artwork. Incredibly, I had never heard of a product called “White Out” (for covering up mistakes) and the smallest screw-up meant starting over. So, as I’ve indicated under each of these cartoons, I sometimes left things out.

I hate drawing this type of rug because I can never seem to make the concentric circles come out right. I’d get halfway, as shown, and quit.

Here’s my best attempt:

Crap template:

It’s riffing on Westerns. You might see dialogue like that, talking about one cowboy riding another’s horse, leading some characters to surmise that something’s wrong. In Far Side fashion though, instead of a cowboy, it’s a chicken.

Here’s discussion about the comic:

https://old.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1fodrfz/peter_what_is_the_joke_here_what_makes_circles/

No clear consensus over there either, but probably just “doing something that feels busy, but is actually ineffective”.

An earlier version of this strip, published in his pre-The Far Side comic Nature’s Way:

The bird took the S from the speech bubble and fed it to its chicks. The bully intended on saying “I’m going to beat your ass!” It’s a 4th wall break of an S commonly looking like a worm.

The art might also be something of a callback to this comic: https://discuss.online/post/38690279

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

Working on the Beaten Path

Transcript (commentary):

This idea came in up above and came out on the bottom cartoon.

An early sketch of this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

“Did I say you could come up?.. Did I?”

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Every time I do a cartoon about dungeons and torturing, etc., I get a letter from a group called Amnesty International. They feel cartoons on this subject are insensitive to the fact that torturing is something that continues to this day all over the world. And, although I feel my cartoons treat the subject in a mostly harmless way, this group has at least raised my consciousness to this problem.

But what I want to know is, does Wizard of Id get these letters?

Some context on this comic:

Transcript:

Drawing God in any context, let alone a cartoon, poses some obvious risks.

In the upper left cartoon, I was careful to do two things: First, I made God look the way I think most of us are pretty sure he looks. Secondly, I made sure he was really winning hands down. Even if Norman had only ten points it would have meant that he beat God to the buzzer at least once, and someone would have gotten mad.

“In God’s Kitchen” was fairly benign, since the emphasis was mostly on the earth and the suggestion that things aren’t quite normal here and why.

I was mostly worried about the last cartoon shown here. Not because of readers, who for the most part found it to be a light and silly drawing, but because I started to feel like I was bucking for a lightning bolt to come out of the sky and turn me into something like the kid here.

A related sketch that he appears to have never published:

Some background on this comic:

I think the comics were colorized later, or at least not by him.

It’s one of the earlier comics, and is simple dark humor. Instead of continuing a presumed rivalry full of hijinks, traumatize the gopher. Kind of like if Elmer Fudd did that with Bugs Bunny or something.

Whoops thanks, updated

An earlier version of this comic, from his pre-Far Side strip called Nature’s Way:

Looked it up and this one is marked as being published 1983-09-26, but there’s no good programmatic way to find that out. If I ever figure out a way to make that easy it’d be great to use the original dates as the post titles

Have you considered becoming a speechwriter?

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

I got lucky on this one. The first version seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, and very little had to be changed in the final. (I know most of those people behind the glass.)

Read the whole story in the Krabzaam Zine:

• Several entirely new pages of the Krabzaam saga that couldn’t be contained on the lil’ old internet.
• Cameos from NBA stars, including Jimmy Butler and Lebron James!
• Signed by the artist!
• 16 pages. Color.
• Comes with a FREE Krabzaam sticker