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Gary Larson's comic strip The Far Side has a lot of obsessions - dogs turning on their owners, cavemen creating terrible inventions, gonzo characters marooned on desert islands - but bugs are near the very top.
A former biology student (changing his major to communications in an act he later regretted), Larson's work shows a clear adoration of the natural world and the animals that make it up. However, he clearly has a particular soft spot for bugs.
Indeed, Larson's love for bugs shines through so clearly that he's received a lot of love back, with entomologists naming multiple bug species after him (the strigiphilus garylarsoni louse, garylarsonus beetle, and serratoterga larsoni butterfly.) Here are the pitch-perfect insect comics that earned him that level of love from the experts.
Fireflies | Published May 22, 1986
Sometimes, Gary Larson's comics feel like the exact opposite of a caption competition - an image that couldn't possibly make sense under any circumstances, until you read the text and the gag clicks into place. That's the case in this comic, as a beetle looks out of her window with binoculars, inspecting two glowing lights (eyes?) in the house across the street. How is Larson going to tie this all together?
With an incredibly juvenile joke - and that's fantastic. And while fireflies lighting up their abdomens isn't exactly a secret, it's still a specific enough piece of knowledge that Larson is rewarding his readers for knowing an entomological fact - making them feel smart even as they snigger about mooning your neighbors.
Nukes | Published January 4, 1984
The Far Side is known for its dark humor, and Larson has a few different gags where the world ends (see below.) However, in this strip he absolutely nails the tonal dissonance of the worst thing possible happening in the background while an incredibly cute visual plays out in the foreground.
Larson has often been accused of liking animals more than humans, and while he's denied the claim (telling a 20/20 interviewer "Down deep inside, no I don't, but I've never met an Irish Setter I didn't like,") this comic makes it clear where it comes from, as human extinction is shrugged off as kind of a great thing from the perspective of bugs.
One of Larson's greatest skills as a cartoonist is in how he utilizes multiple fields of view in his strips. This strip exemplifies how the foreground and background can not just contain different information, but combine to deliver laugh-out-loud irony.
Pupa | Published August 2, 1980
A cousin of Larson's foreground/background trick is his ability to force the reader to imagine what happened before his single-panel gag or directly after. In this case, a camper went to sleep in their sleeping bag, only to undergo a moth-like transformation. The gag relies on a surreal assumption that happens entirely in the reader's head, showing how good Larson is at telling a story.
There's also another reward for some (admittedly basic) entomological knowledge, as this gag is only really accessible to those readers who understand the pupal stage and its resulting metamorphosis.
Entomologists | Published January 30, 1985
This is the kind of comic that got the Far Side creator love from entomologists, despite technically making fun of them. A lot of bugs rely on hydraulic pressure to extend and move their legs, meaning that when they die, the pressure vanishes and their legs curl inwards. While the technicalities might not be widely known, everyone knows what a dead bug looks like.
Larson counts on that knowledge, suggesting that when insect scientists die, they've spent so long studying their subjects that they naturally adopt the same pose. The comic is also impressive for its composition - only the scientist is really 'needed' for the gag, but Larson sensed it would be funnier to make him a relatively small, pathetic figure in the corner of an office, complementing the ridiculous pose.
Honorable Mentions
A brief pause in our list, now, for some honorable mentions and some fun facts about Larson's bug comics. The comics in this section are all funny, but lack that extra step of our 10/10 picks. For example, it's very funny to show someone studying a 'Know Your Insects' book, only for the contents to familiarize individual insects by their names rather than their species, but you could swap in another type of animal and the gag would still work.
One of our best 'nearlies' is the gag above, where an old woman steels herself to fight off a plague of giant locusts, using only a standard fly swatter. It's a fantastic gag, and unofficially our #6, but doesn't quite combine the same level of entomological tidbits and comic-art mastery that our other entries embody.
The One Bug Larson Couldn't Touch (But Did Anyway)
While Gary Larson created a huge amount of insect comics (not even getting started on the spiders), there was one bug he was essentially banned from depicting. When The Far Side began in 1980, Larson worked under some strict rules, and the biggest of them all was a ban on scatological humor. Even when depicting an outhouse in an Old West scene, Larson had to wrangle with his editors over how far the door could be ajar.
It's therefore understandable that he felt functionally unable to create any comics starring dung beetles. In The Prehistory of The Far Side, Larson shares some comics that never got past the censors, saying he spent a decade "dying to do a cartoon about dung beetles," but knew it would never fly.
Happily, that changed. By the '90s, Larson could get away with depicting dung beetles sans actual dung, and in 2025, he posted a Christmas-themed dung beetle gag on the official Far Side website.
Larson Proved Jim Davis' Critics Wrong
In finding so much success with insect comics, Larson accidentally disproved early critics of Garfield creator Jim Davis. Before the iconic cat, Davis started out with a strip titled Gnorm Gnat, with gags built around an insect protagonist (several of which were later retrofitted to Garfield and Jon Arbuckle.)
Davis switched protagonists after an early editor told him, "Your art is good, your gags are great, but bugs - nobody can relate to bugs!" While Davis certainly found success following this advice, Larson proved it's not quite true.
Bee | Published August 16, 1988
Okay, okay, our final entry! In a world of anthropomorphized animals, having a bee in your car can become a lot more traumatic than it sounds. Larson's foreground/background trick is in place in this comic, as is his habit of having characters demonstrate relatively low-key reactions to alarming circumstances (and vice versa.)
There's a lot of humor in the driver's calm strategizing over how to get rid of this gigantic pest, but Larson's real trick is setting up a gag that begs the question of how things possibly got to this point - how did the bee even get into the car without the driver noticing? Larson's surreal world turns a familiar experience into a situation that's five types of impossible.
Those are our picks for Gary Larson's best ever Far Side bug comics - let us know in the comments below what you think of our picks, and what other subjects you want to see us cover.
