The King of Horror, Far Side. King even wrote the foreword to Larson's The Far Side Gallery 2, stating that "I like Gary Larson a lot ... mostly because he does what artists and humorists are supposed to do: he sees what I could see if I could have his eyes. I don't have them, but thank God they are on loan."

Here are 10 Far Side comics that every fan of Stephen King should check out - including his favorite Gary Larson strip and the Far Side comic he appears in himself.

10 Stephen King's Childhood Ant Farm

Yes, Stephen King Appeared in The Far Side

Larson often parodied real people in The Far Side, from Madonna to Pablo Picasso, and Stephen King is among their number. In the strip, a young King stands eerily over an ant farm in which he's placed two tiny human toys, which are about to be dragged below ground by the (comparatively) gigantic insects. This is Larson imagining the sick mind that would go on to create the Overlook Hotel, Pennywise the Dancing Clown and the villainous Randall Flagg. Thankfully, this depiction didn't offend King, who has nothing but glowing words for Larson's work,. itting, "he turns the world as I know it into a funhouse mirror."

9 The Hand That Fed Me

Stephen King's Favorite Far Side Comic

In his The Far Side Gallery 2 foreword, King names this as his favorite Larson comic. The strip sees a dog showing off its various trophies, including "the hand that fed me" - a simple pun on the idea of biting that hand that feeds you, here taken literally. It's a goofy, somewhat grisly gag that - like a lot of Larson's comics - imagines a world where animals engage in typical animal behavior, but with a reasoned human perspective.

However, while King may love this strip, he made it clear that his fondness for The Far Side wasn't about singular gags, but about the bizarre world they create when read one after the other. Larson's world doesn't have consistent rules, but his sense of humor and comedic logic shine through, with readers able to tap into his perspective and enjoy his work even more. King explains:

This cartoon alone only made me smile. But the effect of Larson's work, unlike that of many surreal cartoonists (I except only Gahan Wilson from the general rule), is cumulative. I found myself not looking at these circumstantial jokes as single things, isolated from one another; they seem somehow connected.

8 Just in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

What If Cujo Could Operate Heavy Machinery?

While the dog in the previous entry may have taken its owner's hand, the hound in this strip killed him (and the family cat) with a steamroller. Larson's murderously competent dog can't help but bring to mind Stephen King's Cujo - a novel in which a family dog turns rabid, trapping his former owners in a rapidly overheating car. Open the image gallery below for more Far Side comics starring dogs who are done with their owners.

One of Larson's best tricks is taking a well-known archetype and flipping one key quality about it that everyone knows. In the case of dogs, there's inherent humor in the idea of man's best friend turning against him - and inherent horror too, as King has more than proved.

7 Show-and-Tell

Stand by Me With the Dials Turned to 11

In this comic, a kid prepares to show off a severed head at show-and-tell, with his teacher unknowingly setting up the grotesque presentation. Of course, schoolkids finding a body is the plot of Stephen King's novella The Body, later adapted into 1986's Stand by Me, starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman. Considered one of the definitive coming-of-age stories in cinema, King's story juxtaposes the end of childhood with the end of life, drawing some dark parallels between the two. Open the image gallery below for more Far Side comics set in schools.

School is a running theme for both Stephen King - who often shows kids confronting unexpected horrors - and Gary Larson, who likewise loves to take normal, mundane parts of life and throw in one bizarre twist.

6 The First Drop of Rain

Far Side's Dark Take on Andy Dufresne

Not every Stephen King story is about horror, and his novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption depicts the incarceration and eventual escape of Andy Dufresne, who digs a tunnel out of his cell over many years. The story was adapted in 1994's iconic The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, where Robbin's Dufresne crawls to freedom through a sewer pipe.

Unfortunately for the characters in this comic, their own tunnel wasn't quite as well thought through. Having escaped their cells, the convicts are ready to surface, even feeling a single drop of the same purifying rain that Andy Dufresne emerges into in the movie. Sadly for them, they've actually tunneled under a huge body of water, and they're about to be washed all the way back to their cells (and that's if they're lucky.)

5 Clown Execution

What If Derry's Cops Actually Did Their Job in IT?

One of Stephen King's most horrifying creations is Pennywise the Dancing Clown - an extradimensional horror which terrifies and then consumes the residents of Derry, Maine. In King's novel, the Lovecraftian predator is dealt with by the Losers Club, as a group of neighborhood kids team up against the villain not once but twice. In the book, Pennywise's corruption influences the town of Derry, causing adults to turn a blind eye to its existence as well as strenghtening their darker urges.

However, if the grown-ups had been able to snap out of Pennywise's spell, then readers might have gotten a scene like the one above, where two cops accompany a clown to the electric chair - albeit while feeling a little weird overseeing the execution of a children's entertainer. Indeed, while there are a lot of differences between King and Larson's work, one of the things they agree on is that clowns are the enemy.

Larson depicts clowns as almost a different species, suggesting that mischief is essentially hardwired into their DNA. Indeed, one of Larson's clowns is even more dangerous than Pennywise, depicted seconds away from starting nuclear armageddon after somehow finding its way into a missile silo.

4 Hell on Wheels

A Lighter Take on Christine's Demonic Car

In 1983, King published Christine - the story of a murderous Plymouth Fury that is possessed by its former owner and can heal from any damage sustained in its lethal rampage. Larson has a much lighter take on the idea of a demonic car, showing the devilish 'Roy' speeding around Hell in a car that isn't a million miles away from a Plymouth Fury. Indeed, perhaps this is King's Christine in the afterlife, finally having a found a driver who can keep up with its murderous appetite.

3 Stuart's Left Hand

Far Side Does King's The Dark Half

Stephen King's The Dark Half follows Thad Beaumont - a writer who is possessed by the murderous alter-ego of George Stark (an evil twin he absorbed in the womb.) Of course, Thad doesn't initially know that he's Stark, first encountering the villain via menacing notes written in his own handwriting. The character in Larson's Far Side comic is suffering the same fate, as his own right hand plots against him. However, while King's The Dark Half is a commentary on the nature of addiction, Larson is mostly just goofing around taking yet another idiom too literally - usually, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing is a critique of organizations with poor communication, not a literal affliction.

While Larson's comic may be goofy, the condition he depicts actually exists. Often referred to as Alien Hand Syndrome, issues with the brain's corpus callosum can make it so that a person's hand performs actions they're not conscious of directing.

2 Vampires Are Everywhere!

Far Side Does Salem's Lot

Stephen King's terrifying 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot takes place in a town where vampires are slowly turning more and more of the locals into their fellow undead. Despite using vampires in the story, King's novel is about paranoia and corruption, written around the time that the Watergate scandal was breaking and figures of authority were revealed to have engaged in a variety of cover-ups and criminal acts.

While spinning the concept as a joke, Larson's comic speaks to the same idea of maddening conspiracy, and the (still pretty scary) image of a man warning the people around him that vampires are taking over, not realizing that they're ignoring him because they're already well aware.

1 Pure Silver

Gary Larson's Simplifies Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf

Originally conceived as a calendar and taking place over a single year, Stephen King's novella Cycle of the Werewolf follows Marty Coslaw - a ten-year-old kid who realizes that a werewolf is preying on his small town. The story follows Marty as he investigates the true identity of the beast and ultimately outsmarts the monster, tricking it into a trap where it's shot using silver bullets.

In the case of Cycle of the Werewolf (spoilers) the monster turns out to be local holy man Reverend Lowe, however Larson imagines things going way worse if the werewolf was actually the guy out there selling silver bullets to prospective werewolf hunters... then tracking them down to eat them, safe in the knowledge that they're actually defenseless. As funny as Larson's comic is, it's also a pretty great pitch for a horror story by itself, showing why King considers The Far Side's creator, "uniquely unique."

Those are 10 Far Side comics that every Stephen King fan should see, as Gary Larson tackles many of the same concepts as King's novels, albeit from a very different perspective. Let us know in the comments below what other Far Side comics should be on this list, and which Stephen King stories lend themselves to a comedic twist.