Gary Larson’s world is inhabited by matrons with bee-hive hairdos and snakes in therapy, with the ocassional wart hog cocktail party and heated game of eraser tag in the laboratory. Wolves chase sheep in taxis and cows stand upright when no one is looking. Welcome to the Far Side!

Larson’s new book, “The PreHistory of The Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit” attempts to answer those questions that constantly haunt Larson: how do you start? Where do you get your ideas? Which cartoons are your personal favorites?

In his own words, doodles and sketches, Larson gives his fans a closer look at his creative process.

Larson loved to draw as a child, but never considered being a cartoonist. He said he only studied art in required classes. “My love was science—specifically biology and, more specifically, when placed in a common jar, which of two organisms would devour the other,” Larson states.

“One day, a long, long time ago at a retail music store where I had been working for almost a year, I had an unexpected revelation. As I stood next to the cash register, the sky seemed to suddenly open up over my head and a throng of beautiful angels came flying down and swirled around me.

“In glorious, lilting tones, their voices rang out, ‘you haaaaate your job, you haaaaate your job…’ And then they left. But I knew it was true—angels don’t lie. I hated my job.”

Larson realized working retail was not what he wanted out of life. “We didn’t even get good employee discounts. I wanted something more. Insurance salesman, ice cream vendor, gravedigger—many things occurred to me, but I was pretty much rudderless.”

Larson took a few days off from the music store and thought about the future. “Of course, thinking about a career crisis for two whole days was more than my attention span could handle (a clue to why I do a single-panel cartoon instead of a strip), so I sat down at the kitchen table and started to draw. Exactly why, I’ll never know,” he states.

During his adolescence, Larson had an interest in “Mad” magazine and an appreciation for the cartoons in “Playboy”. Other than that, he knew nothing about cartooning. However, “I gave it a whirl and drew a half-dozen cartoons. The net result was six of the worst little drawings cartoondom had ever seen,” he said.

The following day Larson took his six drawings to a local magazine in Seattle called the “Pacific Search”. The editor liked them and gave Larson a $90 check. “Immediately, I was surrounded by angels singing, ‘You looooove cartooning, you looooove cartooning…'”

Larson started to draw a single panel cartoon called “Nature’s Way,” best described as a “Mesozoic Far Side.” A small weekly newspaper began publishing his cartoon on a regular basis.

“The sheer excitement of being published was enough to live on for a while. But the three bucks a cartoon I was getting began to have a sobering effect on my vision of doing this professionally,” he states. Fear of rejection kept Larson from submitting his work to other publishers.

“Eventually, I hung cartooning up and went out and got a real job—an investigator for the local Humane Society, to whom I never disclosed the fact that on the way to the job interview I ran over a dog.”

In 1979, a reporter friend of Larson’s showed his cartoons to her editor at the Seattle Times. “‘Nature’s Way’ was resurrected and began appearing weekly in their Saturday edition—next to a kid’s crossword puzzle called ‘Junior Jumble.'”

Later that year, Larson submitted his work to an editor at the San Francisco Chronical. On January 1, 1980 “The Far Side” was born and was soon offered to newspapers through Chronical Features.

Collections of Larson’s cartoons have sold more than 10 million copies all together. Universal Press Syndicate began distributing his cartoons to newspapers in 1984.

“I don’t know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple cups of coffee into me and weird things just start to happen. The idea for any cartoon is rarely spontaneous. Good ideas usually evolve out of pretty lame ones, and vice versa. I’ve destroyed a few good cartoons by reworking them to death.”

“Some cartoons spring forth from just staring stupidly at a blank sheet of paper and thinking about aardvarks or toaster ovens or cemetaries or just about anything,” he states. “Others come out of doodles that I continually enter into a sketchbook.”

For example, Larson once drew a cartoon entitiled “The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct.” The cartoon showed a group of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes. “That cartoon stayed in my sketchbook for almost a year until, pressed for ideas one week, I dug it out and submitted it for publication.” The cartoon went on to become one of Larson’s most famous and popular.

Larson is modest about his talent. “I’ve rarely laughed out loud at the things I’ve drawn. I’m a little too close to the joke to ever be surprised.”

“The PreHistory of the Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit” by Gary Larson. Copyright 1989, Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission of Andrews and McMeel. All rights reserved.