Here’s Larson talking about that:

Transcript:

In my hometown, The Far Side is carried by the Seattle Times, which “crops” the cartoon so that it fits a little better on their comic page.

On the day this cartoon was published, friends started calling me for an explanation as to its meaning. I hadn’t seen the cartoon myself (other than when I had drawn and submitted it weeks before) and the conversations sort of went in circles before I got a few clues that something was amiss

I opened the newspaper to the comic section and discovered that someone, in order to compress the cartoon’s size, had chopped off a rather vital part of the humor.

The newspaper ran a correction the following day but, all in all, it’s sort of nice for a change when no one understands one of my cartoons but it’s not my fault.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

I’ve always been drawn to swamps and wetlands and the things that live there. In those places, I find myself mostly looking downward for frogs, fish, salamanders, or whatever.

I think if I ever lived in feudal times and stormed past a castle gate, I’d have to check out the moat on the way across.

I suppose I like this cartoon not only for the suggestion that the usual crocodiles have been replaced with goldfish, but because that’s me yelling on the bridge.

HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA

This originally appeared in Nature’s Way, Gary Larson’s earlier cartoon before The Far Side:

It’s interesting that they didn’t fix that at some point. They’ve fixed other mistakes, and that doesn’t look intentional.

I don’t think it’s AI, it’s likely just laziness. There have been a few comments in here showing how often the 3 panels were literally copy/pasted in the newer strips.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (First Draft):

You know, we could really use a spatula.

Transcript (Second Draft):

“Man, this is our lucky day, Bob… Smashed bacon + eggs on the road.”

I assume so. An ace lead is pretty good but not the best in most trick taking games, so I can see that as “Teddy bears are nice and let you win”

Hi from Lemmy 👋

There isn’t a good way of knowing the original date, and there aren’t good titles, so they’re posted with the “rerun date”.

Here’s some pics for scale:

I was slightly confused and wondering about beetles the size of a beer bottle, but it seems like not really, the males just like big mates and don’t discriminate much.

Yeah, I don’t see anything beyond “the bears are mugging him instead of eating him”

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

The Los Angeles Times, which carries The Far Side, has taken umbrage with my cartoon on several occasions. (Apparently, someone there actually reads the comics beforehand.) These three, as I recall, created some conflicts with the “good taste” standards of that paper, and I believe all three were deleted from their comic page back in the early eighties.

The first two I suppose are subjective, although I don’t remember other papers censoring them. Their rejection of the elephant cartoon, however, had me baffled. I’ve always found it appalling that the demand for ivory has caused these magnificent animals to be continuously poached—but the ultimate act of contempt for the rights of wildlife has got to be represented by the elephant’s foot wastebasket. And that’s the point I was striving for in this cartoon—not that I was hoping to make a profound comment of any sort (the cartoon is really pretty inane, I think), but just who wouldn’t be upset to find out something like this had been done to a former part of their anatomy?

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

My publisher’s gift and stationery division decided one day they wanted to make this and a few other Far Side cartoons into posters. The problem was this one particular cartoon featured nothing but penguins and ice, which didn’t lend itself to color.

When the finished posters show up, I was interested to see they had indeed found a use for color in this cartoon―they made the one penguin (who’s singing “I Gotta Be Me”) yellow―the others remained in black and white.

In other words, the entire point of the cartoon had been reversed. In the original version, I was being cynical about the futility of trying to be unique in a sea of commonality. But by making just the singing penguin yellow, the publisher made him stand out, and the cartoon then made the same point the song originally intended.

At least that’s what I feared. I was really worried someone might actually think I was being sensitive for a moment. That would make me sick.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Originally, the title I intended for this cartoon was, simply, “Predator/prey relationships.” But when I finished the drawing, something about the way the wolf was looking back over his shoulder evoked a need in me to probe their relationship a little deeper.

Yeah, that would work better than the original. There’s a few SRoMG along those lines:

From what I understand that’s not really the mods’ decision. Reddit was getting takedown notices from the copyright holder, which is unfortunate but not worth fighting. You can argue fair use, but Reddit doesn’t care and the mods are just people that don’t have fancy lawyers so here we are.

If you’re up for submitting that as a regular post here, that’d be great! It’s got strong SRoMG energy (which would probably also appreciate it), there’s been some similar explorations:

https://discuss.online/post/22838639

That’s actually pretty good for a modern Garfield. There have been some with literally no change other than the speech bubbles.