The most loving, gregarious dogs seem to get down to their basic instincts pretty fast when you reach for their food bowl midmeal. (For a real thrill, try reaching for it in slow motion. Dogs love the sensation that their food is being stalked.)
I started playing with this tendency in dogs, and it just sort of evolved into the grizzly bear cartoon seen at left.
Yeah, some people want to take the easy out and blame the youths. I think it's interesting to consider what should happen though. People want to get ahead in life and you can't really blame them. Do we need to burn it all down and go fully automated luxury communism, or is there a way to fix it?
Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that has an excess supply of potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
This is an earlier comic of his, 1980 (copyright date on top right) is shortly after The Far Side was started and the art still kind of resembles his earlier strip Nature's Way. Here's another Nature's Way strip to compare:
How are you viewing them? With an app or with a web browser? I haven't changed the way I've been posting them recently. Someone else messaged me recently about an error, but it turned out to be an issue with their client parsing the post wrong.
For accessibility, and to make it easy to find later. The original page has the caption as regular text and I add it to the image, so it's easy to include it
As an aside, interesting note in the Wikipedia article about him:
Brown was the leading exponent of violence in the American abolitionist movement, believing it was necessary to end slavery after decades of peaceful efforts had failed.
Because The Far Side is a vertical, single-panel cartoon, I've rarely had the luxury of being able to draw long things (like whales, snakes, ships, etc.) in an accommodating shape. In general, the perspective has to be from front to rear, as opposed to side to side. (Sunday cartoons, which I started not long ago, and modified dailies are the only exceptions.)
In cartoon strips, you frequently see the latter approach—because the strip lends itself well to horizontal images. In The Far Side, as the examples on this page indicate, ships come at you head on, classrooms are view from either the front of the back, and riding in the car is often seen from the perspective of the backseat looking forward or from the windshield looking inward. I just can't draw a '59 Cadillac in profile.
I'm saying this because I drew The Far Side for years without truly being cognizant of why I approached it this way. I was just trying to figure out ways to cram things into a little rectangle. It was a friend of mine (also a cartoonist) who pointed out that I had inadvertently developed one or two drawing skills in the process.
The limitation of space I fought in the beginning ended up being the best drawing instructor I ever had.
Is a hard hat enough to make a difference? Seems like it if it's big enough to kill you without a hard hat, it would still be really bad for your neck with a hard hat.
Some background on this comic:
Transcript: