The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Countless imitators; only one Far Side. It was to single-panel humor cartoons what Weird Tales was to pulp fiction and The Twilight Zone was to television: a new brainspace where anything goes. Drawing upon Charles Addams’s perfect sense of comic timing and his own encyclopedic knowledge of zoological trivia, GARY LARSON (1950– ) gave us fourteen years worth of unexpected conceptual reversals — and has been immortalized by the scientific establishment for his efforts. Just Google the word “thagomizer.”