Explanation?
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
123 points (99.2% liked)
The Far Side
5635 readers
296 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The other answers are both partly right, but to be more specific: The albatross is really good at navigating air currents and ocean winds even when very far out at sea. If you could see an albatross, chances are you were safe from storms and such, and supposedly sailors would even sometimes use them to navigate by to stay safe. Seeing an albatross was good luck - not seeing one for an extended time was bad luck
So the comic inverts that from an Albatrosses point of view. Being followed by ships is an annoyance to them
That's why the Mariner in the poem seems to bring a curse upon his ship when he shoots the albatross - he has literally destroyed a symbol of good fortune
Turns out things won't go well for the albatross (it will get shot). The saying, "to wear an albatross around one's neck" is an indication of having been cursed. It comes from a 227 year old poem. From Wikipedia:
In the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an albatross follows a ship setting out to sea, which is considered a sign of good luck. However, the titular mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow, an act that will curse the ship and cause it to suffer terrible mishaps. Unable to speak due to lack of water, the ship's crew let the mariner know through their glances that they blame him for their plight and they tie the bird around his neck as a sign of his guilt. From this arose the image of an albatross around the neck as metaphor for a burden that is difficult to escape.
That's very interesting, though i think in this context that background info might be being used as a pun since the albatrosses are the ones being followed in the comic.
I'm going to presume that sometimes sailors, when looking for land, will at some point follow birds thinking they will lead the ship to land. In this instance they've found two albatrosses. Unfortunately, albatrosses can fly 10,000 miles in a single journey, so they could theoretically be very far from land. The albatrosses don't realize the intent and just think they're being followed.