This Fan-Favorite Far Side Character Has A Tragic Off-Panel Ending

The subject of the punchline of what is widely considered The Far Side’s best jokes actually suffered a much darker fate than readers witnessed, at least according to creator Gary Larson’s personal head-canon, as he revealed in the 1990 The Prehistory of The Far Side, where the author elaborated on some of the “short stories” that inspired his classic cartoons.

The Prehistory of The Far Side features a section entitled “Stories,” in which Larson shares some of prose vignettes that he wrote, some of which inspired Far Side comics, the end results of which were often totally different than what the author had originally come up with.

Take the very first example Larson offers to open this portion of the book: the violent, tragic death of “Professor Irwin Schwartz,” writer of “Mind Over Matter,” the result of a fiery car accident, which inspired what was ultimately more of a slapstick comedy gag, Far Side-style.

The Far Side’s Hilarious “Mind Over Matter” Joke Could Have Been So Much Darker

First Published: May 20, 1981

There is an interesting phenomenon when it comes to The Far Side; many of Gary Larson’s most revered, fan-favorite cartoons come from early in his career, when The Far Side was carried in the smallest number of newspapers. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that, as The Far Side became a national phenomenon in the mid-to-late-1980s, Larson’s cartoons were collected in a series of books, which became like sacred artifacts to his most devoted readers. Indeed, these collected editions of The Far Side deserve greater credit for the role they played in establishing Larson’s reputation.

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The Far Side’s “You’re sick, Jesse” cartoon, equally infamous and iconic, actually had an even more edgy follow-up, published years later.

What made The Prehistory of The Far Side notable when it came out in 1990 was that it did more than just aggregate Larson’s work, but offered a retrospective on it by the author himself. And, more than just a look back, The Prehistory pulled back the curtain and offered a more detailed analysis of Gary Larson’s creative process than the notoriously interview-shy artist had ever permitted before. Among the revelations was the horrifying fate of the “author of Mind Over Matter” depicted in this classic 1981 Far Side comic.

In the published panel, the unnamed author is depicted as something of a klutz; despite his alleged expertise in the “mind over matter” subject, he manages to walk directly into a large wooden beam as he attempts to take the stage to give a lecture, sending his glasses flying in one direction, and his papers in another. Embarrassing as this might be, it is nothing compared to Gary Larson’s original plan for the character, which was more in line with The Far Side’s darkest comics.

Gary Larson Toned Down The Violence Of This Cartoon In Order To Get The Joke Across Better

The Prehistory Of The Far Side, Released In 1990

As revealed in The Prehistory of The Far Side, this character not only originally had a name, but also a much more catastrophic ending. Larson’s original “short story” version of this panel reads:

Professor Irwin Schwartz was on his way to give a lecture based on his latest book, Mind Over Matter, when his car failed to negotiate a curve, plummeted over the embankment, rolled end to end across the boulders, and finally burst into flames.

In other words, forget colliding with a pole, because this character initially never even made it to the lecture hall, instead perishing when his car became one of The Far Side’s many literal deathtraps. Notably, this is an example of Larson actually toning down his original idea for publication, several other instances of which the author actually calls out in The Prehistory.

Larson’s original vignette contains the core premise of the punchline, which is that an author touting the supremacy of “mind over matter” would ultimately be bested by the material world, except dialed up to eleven. The final Far Side version of the joke arguably dials this down to a more reasonable seven, but more crucially, it makes the punchline easier to immediately grasp, which is ultimately the true improvement from conception to publication. The car crash version of the joke is potentially a little too esoteric, whereas the final version easily communicates its humor.

Gary Larson’s Ability To Revise And Rethink His Panels Made The Far Side Great

Larson’s Underappreciated Literary Bona Fides

Each of the Far Side comic “backstories” included in The Prehistory of The Far Side are fascinating insights into Gary Larson’s creative mind for their own reasons. Together, the “Death of Doctor Schwartz” story, and the final “Mind Over Matter” cartoon it led to, are an example of how much Gary Larson actually figured out a panel as he was in the process of working on it. This is noteworthy, but not necessarily surprising, as almost all great literary achievements, which The Far Side certainly qualifies as in its idiosyncratic way, are the product of rigorous revision.

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These Far Side “Sequel” Comics Prove Gary Larson Was Playing the Long Game

The Far Side didn’t have recurrin characters, but Gary Larson did produce the occasional “sequel” comic, including callbacks to his earliest cartoons.

“Cartoons are, after all, little stories themselves,” Larson wrote in The Prehistory of the Far Side, and so for him, they were no exception to this rule. Each Far Side cartoon took a great deal of time, effort, and patience; most of all, they required Gary Larson to be open to his creative intution, and to follow his gut when it came to making the changes require to, hopefully, turn a good idea into a great one. In so many cases, Larson succeeded, and that is why The Far Side remains a potent topic of conversation to this day.

Source: The Prehistory of The Far Side

The Far Side

Writer

Gary Larson

Colorist

Gary Larson

Summary

Written and drawn by Gary Larson, The Far Side is a comic strip series that ran from December 1979 to January 1995. A worldwide hit, The Far Side explores life’s surreal side and uses a mix of humans and anthropomorphic animals. As of 2020, Gary Larson decided to pick his pencil back up again and has started The Far Side up, circulating the comics on his official website.

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