Cartoonist Returns to ‘The Far Side’ With Cows Intact : Humor: Gary Larson is back from a 14-month hiatus. And, he promises, with him comes his bizarre view of the world.

A particular look appears on the face of Gary Larson as he takes another bite of his steak in an intimate Seattle restaurant.

The expression, something akin to that of a baby catching sight of its first soap bubble, materializes as the creator of “The Far Side” begins a tale about a type of catfish found in the Amazon, one of the spots he and his wife visited during his recent sabbatical.

The 39-year-old cartoonist explains that this spiny-finned specimen swims into the privates of animals to plant its eggs. “Humans, too,” he adds with delight. Once inside, the creature cannot be extracted without an excruciatingly painful operation. Here he stops transfixed, looking like his own drawing of Einstein before a blackboard filled with formulas proving that time actually is money.

Ah, yes. Nature.

“Ha,” he says with a satisfied smile. “And they say there’s no God.”

Of course, there’s a God. It is the same omnipotent being who pulls a simmering Earth out of a cosmic oven in a Larson drawing while musing, “Something tells me this thing’s only half-baked.” And it is the same one who will return to his heaven today, with the appearance of the first new Larson cartoon after a 14-month hiatus.

Refrigerator doors will be populated by fresh absurdities--cows that stand on hind legs, lions that attack tourists’ car doors with coat hangers and dinosaur seminars (“The picture’s pretty bleak, gentlemen. . . . The world’s climates are changing, the mammals are taking over and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.”).

Once again, morning silence in offices across the nation will be disrupted with bursts of laughter and the refrain, “Have you seen ‘The Far Side’ today?”

Larson’s life style only hints at the bizarre brilliance that has led to his cartoon’s syndication in more than 900 newspapers. His modest, Tudor-style home, in a neighborhood ringing Lake Washington, has a Persian rug, a fireplace, a comfortable couch; all in all, a habitat more cozy than ostentatious.

Gone are the 20 pet king snakes and the 150-pound python he used to have around the house. But evidence of his creature fixation is still present. In one corner is a brass lamp in the shape of a giant cobra. On the wall is a petrified crocodile, a gift from Smithsonian friends trying out a new preservation process. Upstairs in his study are charts of spiders, a stuffed hammerhead shark. Placed affectionately on his drawing board is a chillingly lifelike cast of a coiled rattlesnake.

In person, his manner is the jeans and T-shirt persona of relaxed anticipation. Wire-rimmed glasses and thinning, collar-length hair grant him grad student chic. Shy and soft-spoken (he rarely gives interviews), he seems flustered by the confines of speech as well as befuddled by the practicalities of life. He seems the kind of guy who might discover cold fusion and, when you pointed out that he had altered the course of history, would reply, “Hum, guess so.”

His wife, Toni, has gotten used to the glassy looks associated with his actively wandering mind. She has suggested a stencil for his forehead, “Back in a Moment.”

Heading for the kitchen to fetch coffee, Larson returns to announce a “slight disaster” because “I forgot to put the carafe under the coffee maker.”

His humor takes quantum leaps at odd moments, times when it seems as if someone has placed a crowbar at the edge of his mind and given it a sudden, sharp tilt. On the way back to the kitchen to clean up the mess, he pauses at the threshold, throws up his hands and mumbles, “Oh no, now my wife’s dead!”

Over dinner, he confides that he has always wanted to start a restaurant that serves only cereal. High concept--he loves it. “You’d, like, have the special of the day be Rice Chex or something. And you’d offer a variety of milk from whole to 2% to skim.”

Discussing the flowers on the table, Toni takes a guess they are freesias, although they might be a false variety, she adds. Her husband is intrigued by the comment. “You know, there’s a whole variety of false things in nature like that. Like there’s a false killer whale, for instance.” The look appears. “I suppose it’s too anthropomorphic to think they’re bummed out about that.”

No wonder Joseph Boskin, author of “Humor and Social Change in 20th-Century America,” remarks that Larson has “a peculiar view of life that most of us don’t have.”

Boskin, a Boston University history professor, recalled: “I was at a seminar with him one time where we both were speaking. He said to me beforehand he didn’t know what he was going to talk about. I suggested he talk about where his ideas come from. He said, ‘I don’t know where my ideas come from.’ ”

Few cartoonists have made such an impact in a single decade. As a man whose 14 cartoon collections have sold 15 million copies here and abroad, he is a publishing gold mine.

His creations are copied on T-shirts, cups, calendars and, for the first time this past year, Christmas cards. Three of his publications have appeared simultaneously on the New York Times Paperback Best Seller list--”The Pre-History of the Far Side” is there at present. He won the National Cartoonists Society’s award for best syndicated panel of 1985 and 1988. A museum exhibit organized four years ago by the California Academy of Sciences, featuring more than 400 of his cartoons, just completed its tour of the nation.

What other cartoonist can claim an insect named in his honor? In this case, Strigiphilus garylarsoni.

“The biting louse,” Larson explains. “I didn’t figure they’d give me a swan.”

Newspaper polls regarding comics pages repeatedly show him among the top five in the country. But opinions vary. A South Carolina newspaper subscriber complained in a survey that Larson “. . . is definitely demented.” A pair of Chicago Tribune readers in a poll countered, “. . . we love the cows, the nerdy kids, the insects, everything. Whatever drugs Gary Larson is on, keep them coming.”

That he should be earning a living with a pencil is more the result of fate than calculation. Raised in Tacoma, Wash. (“sounds like you should say among the wolves or something”), he describes himself as a nondescript child who collected snakes, lizards, a monkey, a boa constrictor. He and his brother Dan created swamps in their back yard. Such pastimes were encouraged by Larson’s father, a retired car salesman, and tolerated by his mother, a secretary.

At Washington State University in Pullman, he rejected a love of biology and studied communications, hoping eventually to go into advertising. He has also been, as they say, a humane-society investigator, one-half of a banjo duo and salesman in a music store. The last job so depressed him that in 1976 he took two days off, sketched a half-dozen cartoons and, to his surprise, sold them for $90 to a wilderness magazine.

Introduced to the world in a panel called “Nature’s Way” in the Seattle Times, he was dropped after one year because of subscriber complaints. Three days later, the strip was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle, the result of a previous trip in which Larson threw all his work together and was given an interview with an intrigued editor.

Even he is sometimes rocked by the immensity of what his mind has spawned: “I wanted it to be fun, but this whole thing has become such a little empire.”

Burnout from nine years of a cartoon-a-day deadline finally drove Larson away from the drawing board, he says. His new obligations will be restricted to turning out five originals a week; papers will also publish “classic” (he blanches at the term) reruns.

The hiatus with his wife of two years, Toni, included a monthlong trip to Africa, two weeks in the Amazon and a four-month stint studying jazz guitar in Greenwich Village, where he roamed unrecognized. Aside from an album cover for jazz guitarist Herb Ellis (jazz is a private passion), he didn’t draw a thing. His creative batteries are restored, he says. But where does one find the electricity for an imagination that could conceive of “Custer’s Last View”--a ground’s-eye shot of a half-dozen grinning American Indians? Frankly, he doesn’t want to know.

“Why go into therapy to try to understand something that’s paying the bills?”

Although aware that others who have taken time off from their strip, such as “Doonesbury’s” Garry Trudeau, have returned changed artists, Larson says he doesn’t know what the ramifications of his time off will be yet.

He may do fewer cows, he says.

But millions of people have been waiting for a new batch of cows for 14 months, he is reminded. The term millions is particularly odious to him. He wavers, then capitulates.

“Well, maybe I’ll do more cows.”

Unlike the social commentary of a Trudeau or Berke Breathed with the former “Bloom County,” Larson’s humor deals in sheer, apolitical weirdness, one that both shocks and tickles with obtuse perspective. Who else would draw disappointed sharks suddenly finding out why swimmers have been fleeing. (“Whoa! Our dorsal fins are sticking out! I wonder how many times that’s screwed things up?”)

His unique, sometimes macabre humor also has generated controversy. Many of the newspaper polls that place him among reader favorites also find him on their most hated list. To Larson, this is just the way the buffalo chips have fallen.

“I never sat down and said, you know, what the world needs is a good, sick cartoonist,” he says. “This is just the kind of humor that was in my family when I grew up. My mom and dad and brother laugh at my work when they understand it. Or when I understand it. It wasn’t until later that I was described in words like offbeat and bizarre. “

He still cringes remembering a heartfelt letter from a woman who thought one of his drawings made fun of schizophrenics--like her son. But most criticism he cheerfully discounts. His first complaint came from a woman upset with a drawing of Santa Claus studying a cookbook titled “Nine Ways to Serve Venison.”

“She was very offended and wanted to know how she was supposed to explain this to her 5-year-old. I thought, come on, lady. It’s like, now this 5-year-old is going to grow up and take a shot at the President.”

Anyway, he takes solace now knowing that none of it matters against the grandeur of environments such as Africa.

Ah, yes. Nature.

“It’s wonderful that there’s still a place in the world where you can’t step out of a vehicle without the risk of being eaten,” he says. “I’m glad there’s still a place like that. It puts things in perspective.”