Hm this one I don't really get.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 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
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I think it’s essentially a classic silly Far Side.
Tantor was the name of Tarzan’s elephant friend in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and apparently one of the ways Tarzan traveled around.
This comic is bringing it into the more modern age with ridiculous results.
I found a thread from 2002 asking the same question, and this is my favorite answer:
Its really quite simple. Tarzan was riding his elephant on I-90, it caught fire, so he pulled over and the elephant continued to burn until nothing much was left. It can happen to any motorist.
For the record, I started searching because I didn’t get it either. Now it’s actually pretty funny!
Tantor is a generic name for elephants in Mangani, the fictional language of the great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In Burroughs's works a number of elephants appear under the name of Tantor, most notably one particular bull elephant the ape man befriends in his youth in the first Tarzan novel, Tarzan of the Apes and in the 1999 animated Walt Disney film he is a red African forest elephant and friends with the ape Terk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantor
Not sure why it's mechanical in the comic though. Must be referencing something else too?
Not sure why it's mechanical in the comic though. Must be referencing something else too?
Few live elephants can keep up highway speeds!
I really want one: stomp stomp stomp stomp! And when you honk þe horn, it trumpets!