His work ran in 1,900 newspapers and sold over 45 million books, yet he refused to be photographed and abruptly vanished at the peak of his career at just 44. Gary Larson walked away from an empire for one reason: a paralyzing dread of becoming mediocre.

This deep dive explores the bizarre, reclusive, and genius mind behind The Far Side. We trace how a frustrated music store employee held up a mirror to human arrogance through the natural world, becoming a hero to scientists while fiercely protecting the integrity of his single-panel surrealism.

• How his brother Dan’s mix of biology lessons and psychological terror shaped his worldview, like terrariums of impending doom
• The animal cruelty investigator job that realigned his empathy away from human exceptionalism
• The Jane Goodall ‘tramp’ comic that horrified her institute until Goodall herself loved it and wrote a foreword
• The real species and the now-accepted paleontology term ‘thagomizer’ that he gave to science
• Why he fought the early internet to protect his work, then returned in 2020 with ‘New Stuff’ after discovering a digital tablet