this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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The Far Side
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Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:
Bello Bear [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/bellobearofficial
Bloom County [email protected] https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.
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This strip references a song from 1918, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.
It has depressing lyrics about crushed hopes and missed opportunities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Forever_Blowing_Bubbles#Lyrics
1919 recording of the song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvpvbla3rWg
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Mvpvbla3rWg
edit: Today, it's best known as the team anthem of English football team West Ham United FC.
Thats pretty neat. Upon seeing this post i was just trying to figure out how to insert the clown named bubbles joke. Thanks for pointing me at music instead.
And a well-chosen anthem it is!
Makes me wonder of Gary Larson was a secret WHU supporter, or at least a Premier League fan.
I doubt that many people today, or in the 80s, would know of this song otherwise.
Does it? The whole joke is about annoying, repetitive sounds being created near the fella who is being tormented. It seems like a coincidence far more than a reference. I would have expected a tell to draw attention to the reference, like maybe a castle, a butterfly, or a dawn to link back to the lyrics... you know, something besides just four words that happen to be in a song somewhere.
Blowing bubbles doesn’t seem like much of a punishment.
But the symbolism in the song of bubbles representing doomed hopes is torture.
It all depends on how much the symbolism mattered to the person blowing bubbles in the comic.
If you’ve never heard of the song, or it doesn’t mean much to you personally, then the devils would probably find something else for you.
You... really don't get it, do you? The person being tormented is the one who isn't doing anything. That's the joke. Look around him. You've got bubbles being blown, which creates the sound of a person blowing right near your ear and the sound of the bubbles popping. Then you've got the hand organ down the bench, and across from him you have the paddle ball on string, and someone knitting. All are repetitive, eventually-going-to-drive-you-crazy sounds, much like the slow dripping of water is not terrible in anyway, but comprises the chinese water torture.
They might all be little demons in disguise, or merely figments created by the devil, but who cares? We know they're not persons being punished, because they could stop at any time if the action was a torment.