One of the biggest differences between The Far Side and most other comic strips is that The Far Side doesn’t have a recurring cast of characters. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, for example, had Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and the rest of the gang, while Jim Davis’ Garfield has Garfield, Odie, Jon, and a handful of other recurring characters. But Gary Larson’s The Far Side, with its non-sequitur, single-panel jokes, didn’t have regular characters, or at least not really.
While they never had consistent names or personality traits, Larson did appear to draw a handful of the same humans over and over again in his strips. There was a bearded, bespectacled man who often portrayed scientists, and a large woman in horn-rimmed glasses as various “wife” characters or catty neighbors. There was also the Nerdy Kid, a heavy child with short red hair, glasses, and usually wearing a striped shirt.
He wasn’t nerdy in the sense that he was all that smart, he was more nerdy like Milhouse from The Simpsons, where his nerdiness came from having a super-punchable face. He’s the kind of character that’s fun to portray as a victim, which Larson did with relish. The Nerdy kid showed up in a wide variety of Far Side comics over the strip’s 15-year run.
Here are nine of the best . This is the quintessential Nerdy Kid comic, which features him being bitten by two animal cookies, something that could only happen to a kid like this. This comic strip offers another example of the Nerdy Kid as the perfect victim.
In this one, he suffers from a disorder called “Luposlipaphobia,” which Larson defines as being “The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.” The Nerdy Kid is such an ideal victim that he needs to use a Monster Snorkel to sleep at night. According to Larson, a Monster Snorkel “allows your child to breathe comfortably without exposing vulnerable parts to an attack.” This strip helps make the point that the Nerdy Kid isn’t really a single character, as there are basically two of him here. Proof that the Nerdy Kid is not nerdy in the genius sense, as he is clearly pushing this door that he is supposed to pull.
Sometimes the Nerdy Kid wasn’t so much a victim as he was a funny observer. With his pupil-less eyes and buck teeth, he seemed to be put upon just for existing, like in this comic strip where the Nerdy Kid has some bugs in a jar in his room and other bugs protest outside of his window with signs that read “Free the Mayonnaise Jar Seven!” It’s as though this kind of thing is always happening to the Nerdy Kid. Sometimes the Nerdy Kid is just a little weirdo, like this comic strip portrays him as being.
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