As we turn the page on a new year, let's flip through the pages of the past in this edition of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. I'm Jason Toon, and since you're reading this, I'm guessing you and I marked at least one of the last 40 years with the same page-a-day calendar… Every Christmas, like clockwork, there it was under the tree. One copy for me, one copy for my brother. Even after I moved out on my own, Mom always made sure to give me the new edition every year.
Limber up, buddy. You're in for a long run. The first of many Far Side daily calendars. A throwaway idea When Andrews-McMeel Publishing first approached Gary Larson about licensing calendars based on his left-field hit panel comic, he wasn't enthused. "I initially balked before being convinced," Larson wrote in the introduction to the calendar's 2002 edition. Part of that skepticism was no doubt Larson's general uneasiness about merchandising The Far Side. "It's getting to be these days almost where the comic pages are becoming mostly little advertising vehicles for other things that are where the real money is," he told 20/20 in a rare 1986 TV interview. "I think it sucks." But Larson also had some reason to think a calendar was a ho-hum, uninspiring little idea. Rehashing old material in an ephemeral format designed to be thrown away? When there were new comics appearing every day in the newspaper, and the old stuff was being collected in nice sturdy books? Wouldn't that devalue his work? The few other comic-strip calendars on the market weren't reassuring, either. Did Larson really want to go down the same road that led to Garfield living it up on the beach?
Portrait of the artist as a cheerful man. From the 1986 segment on 20/20. Larson eventually agreed to a wall calendar for 1985, with a dozen favorite panels. It did well enough that Andrews-McMeel proposed adding a daily calendar for 1986, with a different cartoon every day. Again, you could understand some wariness on Larson's part. One-page-per-day desk calendars were a tiny piece of the calendar market, dominated by themes like "365 Sports Trivia Facts" or "365 Bible Verses for Children". But all that was about to change - because of Larson himself. The cows that conquered a million desks "Some bookstores have sold out of the compendium of 365 cartoons, with no hope of restocking the item," reported the Gloucester County (New Jersey) Times on November 28, 1985. That was nothing compared to where it would go. Every year saw shoppers rush to score a Far Side calendar before they sold out. It seemed like Andrews-McMeel couldn't print enough of them. Bookstores would take out ads to announce the arrival of new stock.
Form an orderly line, people! From the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, 1989. By 1998, the calendar was selling 5 million units annually, two of which went to me and my brother. Every one of my friends seemed to have it, too. We kids didn't necessarily look at the newspaper every day, but we were all flipping the same calendar pages. And if you forgot to turn it over for a week or two, oh, the joy of peeling off a bunch in a row. Had a lowly calendar ever become a shared cultural experience? But its impact went even further than that. The publishing industry realized just how many people wanted a daily bite of content with their calendars, especially funny content. Dozens, then hundreds of chunky competitors popped up every winter alongside The Far Side, the one that made daily calendars a viable category. Then, after 17 years at the top, Larson ended it. It shouldn't have been a total surprise. Larson had retired from doing daily Far Side panels several years earlier, the final entry running on January 1, 1995. That means he'd already turned 15 years of comics into 17 years of calendars. For the man who dreaded becoming one of "The Drawing Dead" - "you know, those cartoonists where you think 'Isn't he dead?' or 'Shouldn't he be dead?'" - his standards could only be stretched so far. "I couldn't understand why it was still doing well," Larson said to Time magazine in 2003. Of course, it was once again a massive hit, selling "four to five times more than any other calendar we have," said Linda Jones of the Borders bookstore chain. "I call it the Harry Potter of calendars." But that wasn't enough to turn it into an annual thing.
An 11-year stockpile of survival supplies. Photo by Redditor kvrdave. After all, there are only 14 possible configurations of the Gregorian calendar. Any calendar is re-usable if you wait long enough. And that, it seems, gave Andrews-McMeel an idea… Turning back the calendar When Larson returned to occasional cartooning in 2019 at thefarside.com, including posting a daily dose of classics from the back catalogue, you had to wonder if the beloved daily calendar could be far behind. Since 2021, Andrews-McMeel has issued slightly updated reprints of calendars past, starting with one of the few to include substantial original material from Larson, the 1999 "theme-a-month" calendar that included a new drawing for each monthly theme. The comics page isn't what it used to be. Generations have grown up without experiencing The Far Side the way it was intended. But in an age of increasingly "mid", algorithm-driven content, the persistence of a truly nerdy, non-pandering phenomenon like The Far Side gives us all hope that weirdness finds a way. Andrews-McMeel says every one of these new editions has been their best-selling calendar of the year. And it reminds us that even brilliant people can be downright terrible at judging their own work. "Subsequently, I learned two things," wrote Larson in that 2002 calendar, about his decision to allow the first one back in 1986. "(1) These calendars are a good thing and (2) I'm an idiot. No. 1 was a total surprise. No. 2, not so much."
You'll have to buy the other 364 days yourself. Copyrighted image used for purposes of criticism and commentary. Yes, I usually got the Far Side calendar, jammed in the Christmas stocking each year. Santa sometimes switched it up, so I also caught up on Sniglets, tried to learn an SAT vocab word each day, and chuckled at some Dave Barry nugget of wisdom. What page-a-day calendars do you remember having or gifting? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat! —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Flip through our back pages, one week at a time:
|
