CARTOONS

Gary Larson plans to get far away from “The Far Side” for at least a little while, the cartoonist of the weird and wonderful announced over the weekend. Larson said he will take a 14-month leave from cartooning, beginning Oct. 30, to spend time traveling, studying the guitar and “recharging his creative batteries.” “The Far Side” which introduced an off-the-wall style of humor into newspaper cartooning, currently appears in more than 800 papers with an estimated daily readership of 90 million. Until Larson resumes drawing Jan. 1, 1990, the Universal Press Syndicate will distribute “Far Side” cartoons from the early ‘80s, when the strip appeared in fewer than 30 papers.