Caption:
“Mr. Cummings? This is Frank Dunham in Production. … We’ve got some problems, Mr. Cummings. Machine No. 5 has jammed, several of the larger spools have gone off track, the generator’s blown, and, well, everything seems to be you-know-what.”
Alt text:
CUMMINGS HAYWIRE & SUPPLIES / LOAD AND UNLOAD
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When this strip originally ran a number of papers cropped the top of the cartoon rendering it somewhat incomprehensible. Of course that wasn’t unusual for The Far Side…
Here’s Larson talking about that:
Transcript:
In my hometown, The Far Side is carried by the Seattle Times, which “crops” the cartoon so that it fits a little better on their comic page.
On the day this cartoon was published, friends started calling me for an explanation as to its meaning. I hadn’t seen the cartoon myself (other than when I had drawn and submitted it weeks before) and the conversations sort of went in circles before I got a few clues that something was amiss
I opened the newspaper to the comic section and discovered that someone, in order to compress the cartoon’s size, had chopped off a rather vital part of the humor.
The newspaper ran a correction the following day but, all in all, it’s sort of nice for a change when no one understands one of my cartoons but it’s not my fault.
