GARY LARSON GOES WILD Larson is drawn to the wild side Endangered animals sold at market in Indonesia Banjo-playing days were an artistic low

Like deer avoiding gun-toting hunters in his panels ("Do I know this guy?. .. I've got to think," one says as he hides behind a tree), Larson is elusive prey. He rarely gives interviews. He refused to have his picture taken for this article, preferring to remain anonymous in his home of Seattle, where his T-shirt-and-jeans wardrobe give him protective camouflage against would-be fans who might beg him to pick up his pen again.

But he agrees to endure a face-to-face interview ("Going into it, my only goal was to survive," he says later in an e-mail) for something he cares deeply about — wildlife. Larson's cartoons abound with animals: elephants, wildebeest, frogs, bears, horses, salmon, birds, alligators. The world, however, hasn't been as kind to such creatures. Larson's hope that his work might aid in ending the destruction being wrought upon them and their habitats, especially in Southeast Asia, has brought him a tiny way out of retirement.

Not to get hopes up: He's not drawing again. But for the first time in four years he is releasing a page-a-day calendar of some of his greatest hits, in stores now.

All his earnings from the 3 million calendars printed, about $2 million according to publisher Andrews McMeel, will go to Conservation International for the organization's work to help end the illegal trade in Asian elephants, Indochinese tigers, Asiatic black bears, pangolins, freshwater turtles, and Siamese crocodiles in Cambodia. The profits will also fund an awareness campaign in China aimed at reducing acquisition of of threatened species for exotic dishes, traditional medicine and for pets. There are also projects in Indonesia and other southeast Asian countries as well.

LEARN MORE: Visit Conservation International to learn about the illegal trade of animals

Species are going extinct about 1,000 times faster today than they did a few hundred years ago and than they have for most of human history, according to the United Nation's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment released last year. It found that in the last 50 years "humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth."

"I can't imagine how we'll be remembered by future generations if we allow this to happen," says Larson. It's a holocaust, he says, only instead of killing off people, we'll be "the flora and fauna Nazis."

Dubbed "the unofficial cartoonist laureate of the scientific community" by Natural History magazine, Larson stepped away from his drawing table and retired from cartooning 15 years ago. He still put together greatest hits page-a-day calendars but stopped even that in 2002.

"The daily calendar seemed, to me, like a kind of cartoon black hole, and you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that that couldn't be sustained indefinitely. That's why I pulled the plug on that one after the '02 edition. Kind of a preemptive strike," he says.

But in early 2006 his publisher Andrews McMeel approached him about doing another one, and Larson had an idea.

For many years Larson — along with a good number of the scientists he so lovingly lampooned — have become increasingly concerned about the environment. On a diving trip in the Galapagos a decade ago, he met someone who worked with an international non-profit group called Conservation International. He liked what he heard and become a donor.

Now he wanted to do something bigger. When his publisher McMeel called, "I knew I had to open my mouth and say something," he says.

That said, the unassuming Larson isn't convinced of his appeal, even 26 years after becoming a cartoon superstar who was syndicated in more than 900 newspapers, receiving several National Cartoonists Society's awards for best syndicated panel and having a biting louse — Strigiphilus garylarsoni — named in his honor.

"At least (the calendar) can die on the vine for a good cause," he says.

Species may go extinct, but not his fans. Far Side calendars sell "four to five times more than any other calendar we have," says Borders' Linda Jones. "I call it the Harry Potter of calendars."

A massive two-volume set of his entire collected works — at $135 a copy — has sold 350,000, and it was the most expensive New York Times bestseller ever at the time it was published, says Hugh Andrew of Andrews McMeel.

Each of his 23 books of collected cartoons are still in print and they've sold a combined 45 million copies.

Larson's genius was that he took the modern sensibility of the comedic revolution going on in the late 1970s, "all attitude and irony," and married it to the craft of the comic art, says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y.

"I'd put him up there with Krazy Kat's George Herriman, Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller and Peanut's Charles Shultz as one of the great artists who have worked in the field of American comics," Thompson says.

Larson had a dedicated audience "that just worshiped him," says Tim McGuire, a professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University, former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

"He definitely broke ground. Some people just hated it, just didn't get it, why would you run that silliness? And his fans were so ardent and so dedicated," McGuire says.

But you don't get a sense of his lofty status when you meet Larson for the first time. He has the air of a very nice person who, if asked by a total stranger at a bus stop to donate a kidney, might find himself saying "Well, I was kind of using it. But sure, I guess, if you need one that badly ..."

Larson and his wife, Toni Carmichael, like things low key. One of the reasons they chose Conservation International is because it seemed to fly be flying "under the radar."

"We started thinking who would be a good organization to work with. We like them because they seem to be doing conservation in the trenches. They seemed more into doing the work than making glossy magazines."

Shy Guy

Larson has thinning blond hair and a slightly sheepish attitude. He arrived a few minutes late for an interview that took two months of careful negotiation with the very protective FarWorks staff that runs his legacy.

"I was worried because we were late. I thought you might leave," he says.

This is not a rock star.

But he'd like to be. Well, not a rock star. A jazz guitarist.

Actually, he is a jazz guitarist.

Since retiring, he's occupied his time with travel and some scuba diving but more and more he's gravitated back to a long-time love: music.

"I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning. (Maybe the greatest one being how you can suddenly find yourself in deep doo doo)," he says later via e-mail.

After college in the early 1970s he and a friend started a band named Tom and Gary, which friends immediately dubbed "two guys as exciting as their names." Tom on the trombone. Gary on banjo.

But in need to pay the bills, he went to work for the Humane Society, as a cruelty investigator. His cartoons bear the inspirational hallmarks of encounters with pets and their owners. Consider the man reaching down to pet a dog clutching a chain saw while its owner says "I wouldn't do that, mister ... Old Zeek's liable to fire that sucker up." Or dogs disguised in hats and coats suddenly leaping over the Post Office counter at carriers arrayed behind it.

It was during his time at the Humane Society that Larson really started working on cartooning. He first sold a weekly panel to the Seattle Times and then, in 1979, was offered a syndication deal with the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chronicle Features Syndicate. "It was no guarantee, but it was a foot in the door," he says.

For two or three months he drew eight cartoons a week and sent them in, to convince his editors that he could actually keep up with the demands of a daily space.

It was a lot of work.

"One week I submitted eight cartoons and they rejected seven," he remembers. But his editor clearly understood the fragile ego of a newly hatched cartoonist.

"He was worried about how I'd take it. He sent back line-by-line explanations, telling me which ones were almost there." Larson smiles ruefully. "I sometimes refer to subject matter that's a little arcane."

The open question is whether his subject matter became less arcane or it merely seemed less arcane because his cartoons had found their natural audience, the scientists, geeks and nerds of the world to whom Petri dishes and protozoa are Dagwood sandwiches and Charlie Brown's footballs.

While he appealed to all, his focus on animals and bumpy guys in lab coats has meant that scientists harbor a special soft spot for the Far Side.

It's almost impossible to visit a lab anywhere in the English-speaking world where there aren't at least a few Far Side cartoons taped to the doors, the windows, the machinery or fluttering on a bulletin board. In some labs it seems as if the walls themselves might not stand were it not for the accretion of Far Side cartoons that cover every available surface.

"Like most scientists, I find him inordinately clever," says Don Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Science. "There's something wonderfully sardonic about the human characteristics he gives to animals. There are so many particular circumstances in science that can be perfectly illustrated by a wry single frame. The trouble with Doonesbury is you really need the strip. Larson gets it in one."

One of the nation's preeminent biologists, E. O. Wilson at Harvard, says he, like most scientists, "will be glad to get anything from Larson, even if it's recycled."

"Every lab in America is festooned with Gary Larson clippings," says Wilson. In the world he creates in his cartoons, so many of which touch on science, "he identifies the foibles of scientists in an affectionate way."

Wilson notes proudly that Larson, too, began his training as an entomologist (that would be a bug scientist), just as he did. Then he throws in a plea.

"Tell him if he ever wants to start drawing cartoons again, he'll have an eager audience awaiting him," Wilson says.

But Larson says he doesn't miss it. "It was 15 years of deadlines," he grimaces. "It can be torture. The clock is ticking on the wall and I'm thinking 'Where is this going?' and staring at a blank sheet of paper."

"Every week when my batch of weekly cartoons would go to FedEx it felt like a small miracle. Then in a few days, it's 'Here we go again.' "

After 15 years of grinding creativity, Larson had had enough. He says he respected the readers too much to ever start phoning it in. And he feared the fate of what's known in the cartooning world as "The Drawing Dead," cartoonists whose work goes on for decades without ever changing.

"You know, those cartoonists where you think 'Isn't he dead?' or 'Shouldn't he be dead?' " he says. Larson's last cartoon ran on Jan. 1, 1995 and he now lives a quite happy, un-deadlined life, in Seattle with his wife. "It was a good gig," he says.

Origins

Larson grew up in Tacoma, Wash. into a family with, as he puts it, "a morbid sense of humor" and an older brother who "scared the hell out of me," whenever he could. He went to college at Washington State University in Pullman. where he started out studying science and ended up studying how to write TV commercials. After college he "bounced around," as he says.

It could be that the narrative path of Gary Larson is not yet complete. Or that it's part of some meta-narrative so large as to be indiscernible to an ordinary human. Much like the woman in one of Larson's cartoons who is on the phone with a neighbor saying "Could you go to your window and describe what's in my front yard?" as a giant eye fills her front window.

Today Larson and his wife lead a life that's remarkably similar to the one they led back when he worked as a cartoonist, without the deadlines. In a city dotted with newly-retired Microsoft millionaires sporting the highest-end techno gadgets and over-the-top house renovations, theirs is a very low-key withdrawal from the work-a-day world.

They moved from one leafy, green Seattle neighborhood to the next neighborhood over, considered quite tony in its day though not quite so happening today. They travel, though not as much as they did right after he retired. For awhile Larson was quite into diving, but he doesn't do that as much these days.

They have long raised bull mastiff dogs. Their last one died a while back, but they're "in the throes of a puppy search" this month.

Carmichael, Larson's wife of 18 years, early on took over as his business manager, a task he says he was entirely unfit for. Trained as an anthropologist, she realized he simply wasn't the person to negotiate business deals. "She's my pit bull, but a nice one," he says of her.

Larson says his interest in science, or at least creepy-crawly things, probably had its start at his grandparents' house on Fox Island in Puget Sound just off the Tacoma Wash. Shore.

"They lived by a great swamp. Today it would be called a wetland. But it was a textbook swamp. Crystal clear water, sandy bottom. Salamanders everywhere." It was fed by a small creek and right behind the high tide drift line. The "frosting on the cake" was that the area was a major habitat for western fence lizards.

It was a "wondrous place" where he spent hours playing as a boy, Larson says.

Today the swamp is gone. "Filled in and a house or two now stands there, and the creek is just a landscape feature through someone's yard. But the other creepy thing is that, while the drift line is obviously still there, the lizards are all gone. I've gone looking for them, walking among the driftwood on a warm, lizardy kind of day. Not a one."

And that's the problem, he says. Everything is getting filled in, dug up, overrun and generally made uninhabitable for everything but humans. Places where animals can live in peace, or at least live, are being destroyed at an increasing rate.

"Our species is rife with greed, war and destruction. But this is new. It's all happening on our watch. It creeps me out, the rate at which we're pushing species to extinction," he says bleakly.

Larson clearly feels an affinity with animals, be they the "charismatic megafauna" that make us all want to race out and save the rainforest (there's a reason the World Wildlife Fund uses the panda for its logo) or lesser newts.

So protecting wildlife is "at the top of my list," he says. Some days he finds himself staring at the walls, wondering how things could have gone so terribly wrong for our planet. Donating the money from the calendar is one attempt at helping to fix it, and stop fixating on it.

"I'm trying to get it off my conscience," he says.

Enlarge By Peter Paul van Dijk Conservation International shows an elephant in Myanmar in 1999; it is tied to break its spirit before training as a logging elephant.