Gary Larson grew up in Tacoma, Washington, along the shores of Puget Sound. His mother was a secretary for the American Plywood Association, his father was a Chrysler dealer, and his brother was a distant cousin to Count Dracula. "I was his lab for exploring various forms of torture. Since we were latchkey kids, every day from three to five-thirty became Survival Time."¹

Brother Dan reduced his childhood to a "... sort of 'Theodore Cleaver Meets the Thing.'... I was plagued with an overactive imagination--compounded by the fact that we lived in a house with your standard, monster-infested basement. Occasionally, I would hear my father's command that never failed to horrify me: 'Go down to the basement, Gary, and bring up some firewood.' Death.

"And so down I'd go, certain I was about to become the leading character in a story that would be told around campfires...