Gary Larson: “A man sit on the bed staring at a chicken perched on his windowsill…”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the 70th birthday of American cartoonist Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, a single-panel comic that ran from 1980 to 1995 and became beloved for its anthropomorphic deer, birds, cats, dogs, dinosaurs, snakes, vipers, and cows, often drawn with cat-eye glasses and beehive hairdos.

In Larson’s world, a man sits on a bed in a disheveled room, staring at a chicken perched on his windowsill. The caption: “The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.”

And another one in which a kid pushes at a door beneath a sign that says PULL. The sign next to him says, “Midvale School for the Gifted.”