There’s a Hair in My Dirt!
By Gary Larson
HarperCollins, 64 pages, $15.95
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`The Far Side” creator Gary Larson, who abruptly quit doing the comic strip three years ago, is back–with a zany ecological book about a young worm who questions his existence. Larson says the illustrated tale, “There’s a Hair in My Dirt!,” is an “adult children’s book.”
In 1995, the shy cartoonist retired his daily cartoon panel after a hugely successful 15-year run. His one-shot punch lines explored man-versus-nature themes with hilarious results, appearing in more than 1,900 newspapers and 17 languages. Twenty-two collections of the strip in book form have sold 31 million copies worldwide.
At 48, Larson is trying to worm his way back into publishing with a twisted tale about the adventures of a family of earthworms.
The setup: Son Worm complains to Mother and Father Worm about finding a hair in his fresh plate of dirt–the final insult.
“We’re the lowest of the low! Bottom of the food chain! Bird food! Fish bait!” he fumes. “I HATE BEING A WORM!”
The father then explains how important he really is to the environment in a cautionary tale that deals with ignorance and the potential consequences of our actions.
But it is told with bizarre humor–in other words, vintage Larson.
Larson rarely gives interviews and is content drinking lots of coffee, playing jazz guitar, walking his two dogs, riding a motorcycle and avoiding rush-hour traffic. He dislikes cooked beets, tabloid TV shows, polluters and people who talk in movie theaters.
Now working on “Tales From the Dark Side II,” an animated special for CBS, Larson was asked recently what he thought was the greatest threat we face as the millennium approaches.
“It has to be the growing pressures on our environment and resources,” he said. “It’s inevitable that our species will one day experience some kind of major reckoning unless we start exercising some capacity to think about where we’re going.
“If that’s not our greatest threat, then it has to be that Pauly Shore might still be making movies.”