For those unfamiliar “Off” is a brand if insect repellent popular in the USA
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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The Far Side
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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 !BelloBear@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/bellobearofficial
Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works
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.
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Off uses a chemical called deet. It has a checkered past.
Good to know but I was putting the joke in context as Off isn’t sold everywhere.
I understand. Its the same stuff sold under different names. Most of them have the orange can with names like cutters and repel. My uncle swore by colmens version.
Im sayimg Off isn’t sold in all countries so say a Malaysian person might not get the joke without context
I understand. I am not arguing with that in any way.
Pretty much everything uses deet. It's one of the only effective repellents.
Icaridin works just as well and is not a neurotoxin.
And doesn't melt plastics, which is another big problem with deet. Interesting, I'll look into it.
It’s still checkered. Would never use that shit.
Looks like the nays have it and I'll keep posting the comics with the caption in the image, as before. I've added a number to the title for making it easy to differentiate between each strip (which will aid in scripting the posting).
What do people think of that? If that's also too much I can go back to just the date for the title.
My recommendation would be to keep the website published date as the title. Having the original publication date would give to much context to the timeless strip.
I'm not sure we need numberings in the title, unless the original published comics had them.
If searchability is the problem that needs solved, then a tagging system would work. Stuff like "cow, hammer, car accident" but this would be cumbersome for a title. Lemmy should have a separate system for that. I've never checked, if there is a feature request forum for lemmy, user generated tags would make lemmy the best user generated content platform to search on.
Ftr, thanks so much for running this community! And thanks for your consistency with the daily posts!
Thanks, I appreciate hearing it!
one more binary dilemma!
Trying out a new posting style today, with the caption as the post title instead of in the screenshot. Let me know what you think!
Don't crop the original comic. It can't be shared from here without taking a screenshot to include the title.
IMO the original comic shouldn't be altered. I like the caption being in the title of the post though, but I also like it having the publication date. I guess my ideal would be unaltered image, plus a post title of " | ", but that might be too much for you to bother with
No me gusta. The caption and its placement is part of the comic, and for some this style can weaken the punchline impact.
Agreed, mostly for this reason.
No
Reading the caption before seeing the image definitely weakened today's comics for me.
Captions of Far Side comics are often effectively punchlines, clarifying whatever weirdness was drawn in the comic. Reading the words and then seeing the image feels disjointed, and loses a lot of the "punch."
Please don't. Knowing the caption ahead of the picture often spoils the joke.
Putting the punchline in the title can kill a comic
Don't like it either. The way I browse, I often click on images directly which doesn't show the title text.
I see Farside comics and I expect to either see the caption under the drawing, or see the lack of a caption and know the joke is in the image. I thought this one didn't have a caption, and was frankly confused a little.
Please don't do this.
I'd rather you didn't.
I think having the text caption makes sense from a searchability perspective, though I side more with the comment that worries about weakening the impact of the punchline by putting it above the comic. Compromise and put the caption in the post body, maybe behind spoiler tags?
No.