Greetings,
Left-Kateers!
 Welcome
to the new Far Left Side home page. To find the latest comic
simply click on the image to the left or use the handy-dandy
navigation at the top.
This minor change to the site mechanism was
necessitated by the new Comments Box found on all the more
recent "permanent"
comics pages. To put it simply, the
data base for the comment widget was getting a mite
confused by the previous set-up.
It's not as tidy as the previous incarnation of the site
but it's worth the trouble, I feel, as I happen to believe
that your opinion matters.
Well, most of your opinions, anyway. There are those intent
upon floating turds in this punchbowl but that just ain't
gonna happen. Just stay on message, kids, and your opinion,
critical or not, will be published. I promise.
On the brighter side, this format change also affords me
the opportunity to add the following:
------------
The
Far Left Side (Originally entitled, believe
it or not, "The
Far Right Side") is the result of
a progressive fervor that gripped
me leading up to the mid-term elections
of 2006. In my own small way I did what
I could to influence public opinion
away from the madness of the far right
back to the soft and cuddly political
center.
The initial idea for the strip came from
one single gag that had been bouncing
around in my brain for the past several
years, and you can see it here in
the very first Far Left Side comic.
As
you can see I was using Gary Larson's opus creation, The
Far Side,
as thematic fodder. I
didn't rip off Mr. Larson's originals
so much as re-imagine them in a left-wing sense. Basically,
I used Mr. Larson's style
as a template, much to the
obvious distress of a handful of Larson purists, but
I've more recently
begun rendering
the comics in a style more resembling my own
though a faint resemblance to
the original yet remains. It is safe to say, though,
that anyone who confuses the current cartoons
with
Mr. Larson's works
could use a few
lessons
in cartoon art history.
I should add that
I recently received an email from
Mr. Larson's legal eagles. Basically
it
said they
were fine with the strip but that
I should be more careful about borrowing
art verbatim. Since I'd never actually
copy/pasted any old Far Side art,
only very carefully re-drawn a few
panels, this wasn't a problem for
me.
After the 2006 elections I kind of slacked-off a bit, generating
only a handful of comics in the whole
of 2007. (It didn't help that I was
like crazy-busy.) But one day, in early 2008, I checked the
log files for the site
and, lo and behold,
I discovered that people were reading
these things. Lots of people! That's
when I decided to take the strip "full-time"
and since January of 2008 it's been
a regular three-times-a-week feature.
Currently,
the site is delivering about
four million pages a year and that number is
on the increase. If you happen to be among that
number let me
just
say that I worry about you. Please
don't have children.
This
modest comic will never equal the
original works of Mr. Larson, as that
creative lightning strikes but once,
but I hope those of you with a foot
in reality's door enjoy it anyway.
=Lefty=
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