Gary Larson and his closest friends agree. If you want to understand the man - the comic genius, the author of the blackly buoyant and sorely missed Far Side comic strip and a cartoonist so revered among scientists that they have named a louse and a butterfly after him - look at his work.
So let's start with a Far Side sampler, a few quick drill holes into the sanctum delirium: A scientist is standing on a podium, holding a duck. All the scientists in the audience are also holding ducks, save for one man, whose eyes are wide open in horror. The caption reads: "Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realises he has come to the seminar without his duck."
A woman is pushing a vacuum cleaner down a forest road and looking around nervously. The caption: "The woods were dark and foreboding, and Alice sensed that sinister eyes were watching her every step. Worst of all, she knew that Nature abhorred a vacuum."
A group of the damned are milling around the lobby to hell, drinking coffee from an urn as though at a company reception. Devils surround them; flames lick through the door. One grumbles to another: "Oh man! The coffee's cold! They thought of everything!"
Gary Larson, too, has thought of everything, up, behind and athwart nature's mad phylogeny; he has drawn everything, and he has put himself into the heads of all his creatures. And since he stopped doing his Far Side strip in 1995, he has left his tens of millions of fans in hell, where the coffee is always cold and the bagels are always onion, because there is no Gary Larson.
Now, Larson, 47, is among us again, not as a syndicated cartoonist, but as a contemporary fabulist, a sort of green Gary Grimm who sides with the trolls and dryads. He has a new book out in the US, due here in September, called There's A Hair In My Dirt: A Worm's Story, a vividly illustrated narrative about a Father Worm, a Mother Worm, a sullen Son Worm and Harriet - a blundering Panglossia with a tiara and blonde bouffant. All around her real life goes on: a firefly "flashes" with a flick of his trench coat, a bear studies a Field Guide To The Humans ("Mushroomer: Usually seen in spring and summer. Shy, secretive, always looking down. Good eating.")
Over a long dinner and later in a jazz club - Larson is a passionate jazz lover and jazz guitarist - he talked about safari ants, Tarzan, Ivan the pet-store gorilla, whip scorpions, cows, ducks and parasites. "I love parasites!" he said. "I can't get enough of them."
He talked about his book, the possibility of doing a feature film and the animated video he had just finished. "It was quite a challenge to do," he said. "I didn't want any dialogue in it, just visuals, screams and grunts."
Larson has been a phenomenal success by any measure. When he retired from daily cartooning, his Far Side panel appeared in 1,900 newspapers. He has published 22 Far Side books, and all but one has been a bestseller. They have been translated into 17 languages and have sold 33 million copies. He has sold 45 million Far Side calendars and 110 million Far Side greeting cards. And almost everything he has done is funny.
Scientists love him because he strips science to its pith, and he gets it right. Entomologists paid him tribute by naming a species of butterfly from the Ecuadorian rain forest the Serratoterga larsoni, and a species of chewing louse found only on owls the Strigiphilus garylarsoni.
Larson's love of the swamp and all plasm within began in childhood. He and his only sibling, his older brother Dan, spent hours wading the waters of Puget Sound at low tide, swinging their nets. They caught grunt fish, octopus, salamanders, sea anemones. "We had this theory that all naturalists suffer from the `oh please, oh please' syndrome," he said. "You're wading somewhere, and you see the biggest and most beautiful whatever. And all you can think, as you try to get up close, is, `Oh please, oh please'."
As a student at Washington State University, he started majoring in biology but changed course midway through. "I didn't want to go to school for more than four years, and I didn't know what you did with a bachelor's in biology," he said, "so I switched over and got my degree in communications. I regret it now. It was one of the most idiotic things I ever did." Entomology, he said, "is my fantasy, the road not taken."
His brother did major in biology and worked for a biological supply company before opening a plant nursery. He died four years ago, at the age of 46, from a sudden heart attack. "It was a profound loss for Gary," said Dan Reeder, a close friend who teaches high school mathematics in Seattle. "It was the only time I ever saw him really down."
In the mid-1970s, Larson was on the verge of getting his dream gig, playing guitar for an established big band, but the band leader ended up hiring somebody else. Crushed, Larson spent the weekend drawing cartoons. On Monday, he took them to a small California magazine, and it bought them all.
Two years later, in 1979, he signed a contract with The San Francisco Chronicle to do a cartoon panel six days a week; the publisher dubbed it The Far Side.
Larson said the relative ease with which he fell into cartooning explains why he became a cartoonist. "I don't think I ever had the stamina, or was thick-skinned enough, to go through a long process of trying to break in," he said. "I just started getting these motivations to keep going."
The great majority of his ideas for cartoons, Larson said, came straight from his head, and drew upon his early exposure to nature. He never farmed out his work to contractors, as highly successful cartoonists often do. He simply sat in his studio, and thought, and drew.
"It's a strange, very isolated world," he said. "Time was amorphous for me while I was working. The only thing I knew was that the deadline was Saturday afternoon at 2 o'clock, because that was Federal Express's last pickup for Monday delivery."
He can't say how he came up with his ideas. Professor Liebowitz and the duck? "I've had those dreams of going somewhere in my underwear," he said. "I took that idea and married it to a serious scientific forum. But it's really all about a duck." Why are so many of his cartoons about cows? "I've always thought the word cow was funny," he said. "And cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humour."