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Walter Besant was a very successful novelist in the late nineteenth century but his income never quite matched his popularity, which rose in the 1880s and slowly fell thereafter. He did not use the royalty system in his contracts but instead sold his copyrights either outright or for a limited term to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. This was probably an expression of his doubts about the longer-term success of his work. He was one of the earliest significant novelists to use the services of A. P. Watt, the first formal literary agent in the UK. Watt was able to farm Besant’s literary property by splitting it into UK book rights (usually sold to Chatto and Windus), foreign book rights, first serialisation rights, second serialisation rights, and syndication in various newspaper and magazine markets in the USA, Europe, and British Empire. In the 1890s Besant earned an average of £1,750 for each of his major novels. Besant claimed that Watt had increased his income significantly. There is evidence that Watt did have an effect, but that Besant becoming a solo writer after 1881 – and gaining securer income in the USA from the Chace Act (1891) – were the more important factors.

In this chapter the author introduces the cultural climate and media landscape in which The Far Side first appeared and thrived. Reestablishing that historical context helps to explain why Larson’s comedy elicited such intense and varied reactions from early readers: some loathing it, to the point of sending indignant letters to editors, the syndicate, and Larson himself, and others adoring it, feeling compelled to clip out, post, reread, collect, and share their favorite installments. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of each chapter that follows.

Chapter one is about Gary Larson’s life and career. First, the author looks into Larson’s childhood in Tacoma, Washington, tracing the connections between his unconventional upbringing and the themes and jokes in his later cartoons. He then charts Larson’s circuitous route towards a career in newspaper cartoons through a number of diversions and dead ends; the story of his ultimate break into comics in 1980 is especially fascinating since it was achieved with so little awareness on Larson’s part of what kind of profession he was pursuing. The author continues by tracing the initially slow, but eventually exponential growth of the panel’s popularity, highlighting along the way many of the accolades, controversies, and stand out cartoons of Larson’s career. I addition, the chapter highlights his arrival as a culturally significant figure through several key achievements: the ubiquity of his book collections and merchandising material, the unprecedented amount of fan and hate mail he received, and the way his work was embraced so avidly by niche reading communities such as scientists and academics. The chapter concludes with a description of how Larson decided to retire The Far Side after only a fifteen-year run (while it was still popular) in order to go out on a high note and preserve his own sanity.

In this chapter the author looks at the business side of Larson’s career, considering how he navigated the challenges of working in this highly competitive and intensively mediated field. Using a qualified version of the auteur theory as a starting point, he posits that Larson’s success as a highly original cartoonist was contingent on his ability to protect his rights as an artist and satirist. He then assesses how Larson almost accidentally stumbled into the role of the iconoclast, but then effectively exerted the clout and independence of a genuine sateur (a satirically-minded auteur) with relative degrees of effectiveness as he negotiated contracts; interacted with syndicate bosses, newspaper editors, and reporters; made decisions about merchandising; and negotiated the pressures of celebrity. The author illustrates that it was often Larson’s lack of “professionalism” that ironically helped him—often intentionally, but sometimes unknowingly—to make decisions or enact strategies that would both protect the integrity of his work and amplify the popularity of his cartoon.