7 Flawless Far Side Comics About Alien Invasions

Published Oct 14, 2026, 7:02 PM EDT

Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor.

Gary Larson grew up in the 1950s, meaning The Far Side's creator came of age in an era of rampant UFO sightings, and more importantly, the first wave of classic science fiction movies about alien invasions. Like all of Larson's interests and obsessions, this rattled around in his brain until he started doing daily Far Side cartoons, at which point it became the fodder for many classic jokes.

Aliens popped up constantly in The Far Side, appearing in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Alien jokes are an entire genre of their own when it comes to The Far Side, which in turn means that there are identifiable subgenres of Far Side alien joke. One of those is the space invader joke, the best of which are collected below.

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7 "In The Middle Of Laverne & Shirley"

Laverne and Shirley is one of those sitcoms, like M*A*S*H, which straddled the 1970s and '80s. The show debuted in 1976 and ran for eight seasons; it was in the middle of Season 5 when The Far Side first started to appear regularly in the San Francisco Chronicle on New Year's Day 1980. This early Far Side cartoon was published in June of that year, about a month after the Season 5 finale of Laverne and Shirley.

Meaning the aliens in this Far Side cartoon at least had the decency to wait until summer reruns to invade the Earth. (That's a joke that hits different in the streaming era, but would have landed at the time this comic first appeared in newspapers. Alas...) In this panel, Gary Larson cleverly gives the reader a POV from the sky, as a fleet of saucers descends, which the old woman complaining about the TV going out can't see out her living room window just yet. But she's about to.

6 "ZZZ!"

This Far Side cartoon has no words, just a sound effect. Or, more technically, an onomatopoeia. It's one of the funniest, and also cruelest, pranks in Far Side canon. (Notice how those two things tend to go hand-in-hand.) In the panel, a flying saucer lands in the park as a couple are having a picnic. A trio of aliens march, or more accurately, slither up to the humans carrying scary-looking alien weapons. One points its gun at the couple and squeezes the trigger.

A flag comes out the end, with "Zzz!" on it. The aliens crack up. The humans scream. It might not be a full-scale invasion, but these extraterrestrial jokesters certainly invaded this couple's idyllic moment. And, presumably, left them scarred for life, always watching the skies wondering what kind of cosmic prank could befall them next.

5 "Cowboys And Aliens"

If the 2011 movie Cowboys & Aliens, directed by Jon Favreau as his follow-up to Iron Man 2, and starring Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and Olivia Wilde, sounds like a fever dream to you, it is because the premise is basically like a Far Side cartoon. No wait, it is literally a Far Side cartoon. Gary Larson published his "romanticized idea of cowboys and aliens" in 1994, 12 years before the release of the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens, which was later turned into the movie.

Larson has never been officially credited as an inspiration for the sci-fi/western mash-up. Maybe he never wanted to, after it became a notorious box office flop. It is just as likely a case of the same bolt of inspiration hitting multiple people over the years. The thing about The Far Side is that Gary Larson made many jokes over the years that were 'just sitting there," so to speak. Like riffing on "cowboys and Indians" by subbing in invaders from space.

4 "Henry Never Knew What Hit Him"

In this six-panel Far Side cartoon, a flying saucer lands right in front of a man as he is walking through an open field. An alien comes out. The alien throws a mean left hook at the man out of nowhere. Punches him right in the kisser and knocks him on his butt. Then just as quickly as it came, the alien gets back in its saucer and flies off.

A flawless comic sequence. One that could stand on its own as a captionless Far Side and still get a solid laugh. What makes this panel perfect is the caption Gary Larson adds: "Henry never knew what hit him." Larson plays with language at a high level here. The phrase "never knew what hit him" is often used in a situation where, say, a car runs a stop sign and hits a pedestrian. Or a piano falls out of the sky on someone's head, as was liable to happen at any moment in The Far Side.

Here, the victim sees the blow coming, as sudden as it is. "Henry" literally doesn't know what hit him, in the sense that it is a random act of senseless violence from an alien he has no way of identifying, or holding accountable.

3 "Shall We Commence With Our Plan?"

What if aliens invaded our world in disguise? It's a classic science fiction question. What if the invaders were disguised as crosswalk signs? Well, it would certainly explain why they seemed to have popped up "on every street corner" by 1988, the year this Far Side cartoon was published. In fact, electronic "Walk/Don't Walk" signs had been ubiquitous, at least in major cities, for a long time by '88, which played right into Gary Larson's punchline.

That is, the crosswalk aliens have been silently maneuvering into position to enact their "plan." What plan? "To gradually eliminate" humanity by "malfunctioning," causing incremental losses via traffic accidents. It is a perfect Far Side joke, by virtually every metric, even if the visual dimension of its gag might require a double take. Actually, in fact, that's another virtue, a feature of this Far Side, not a bug.

2 "Inadvertently, Roy Dooms The Entire Earth"

Gary Larson frequently exhibited the mind of a sci-fi author, even if he was applying those big ideas to static bursts of cartoon humor. In this classic Far Side first contact moment, when "Roy dooms the entire Earth to annihilation" because of a miscommunication about greeting customs.

When the first saucer touches down on Roy's farm, and aliens that look exactly like human hands come out, it spells disaster. "In an attempt to be friendly," the caption explains, "he seizes their leader by the head and shakes vigorously." It is a hilarious representation of the concern that radical differences in physiology, as well as customs, will be the thing that ruins interstellar relations once humanity and aliens meet.

1 "The Foolish Earthlings Do Not Suspect A Thing"

This is a riff on the same premise as the crosswalk aliens from '88. Published three years later, in 1991, this cartoon feels like something Gary Larson cooked up after having a John Carpenter movie marathon. It gives They Live vibes, certainly, with a little of The Thing thrown in. Mainly when it comes to the tentacles.

The cartoon answers the nagging question, in case anybody was wondering, "why we see news anchorpersons only from the waist up." The answer, hysterically, is that they are aliens in disguise, but their human disguises only cover the top halves of their bodies. Still, they've successfully taken over "a prime source of information," and humanity is none the wiser.

It is a silly Far Side gag but with a bit of a jaded social commentary to it. Gary Larson says, in no uncertain terms, that even an obvious attempt to control the flow of information for nefarious purposes would go unnoticed by the majority of the world's population. Scary stuff, but put in a perfectly funny Far Side frame.