Hey, everyone. Since its first strip in 1979, the Farside has shown on purpose what Garfield shows on accident.

The world is full of darkness. Today's book is the prehistory of the Farside.

I'm Kellyn Erskine. I'm a comic, a father, and for a year in my 20s, I also drew single-panel cartoons and posted them online. And I got a healthy

following of 14 people. And I'm David Vance. We didn't really watch sitcoms as kids because of

their bad influence. So instead, I read this comic strip full of mob hits, torture chambers,

cannibals, dead bugs, bunny and jimony cricket, heads and jars, babies and bottles, damned souls in hell, and so many cows.

The prehistory of the Far Side goes behind the scenes on a comic strip so successful that a few years after it and Calvin and Hobbs ended, every newspaper died.

And this is The Book Pile.

All right, one more reason to rate and review the book pile, starting this week.

Whoever writes the best review gets to audition to replace Kellyn.

We're recasting.

A listener named John Period Evans 25 says, after subscribing and listening to an episode or two, my podcast

Q became filled with the bookpile episodes, which were coughed out at high frequency.

Soon I found myself feverishly recommending the podcast again and again to friends and family

that I was in close contact with, and just last week a family member told me that they were

now listening to this podcast and recommending it to their friends.

I wish there was some allusion from today's collective experience to better describe this podcast's effect on me.

Dot, dot, dot, dot. I don't know what he's getting at, but thank you so much.

All right. Remember, we're doing our first live show, October 29th in Provo, Utah at Improv

Broadway. You can get tickets at ImprovBroadway.com. We're roasting New Moon, and I kind of want

to dress up as glitter vampires. Or I want to convince Kellyn we're both going to do it, and then just

show up in a suit.

...