Toasterbook Pro

Gad, those windows opening out of nothingness . . . the people who come out of them are unfailingly either depressing or angry (though incompetence appears to be another theme at work here). Nevertheless, when confronted by an inexplicable small window opening out of a big yellow void, a fairly safe response is to hand its occupant an unplugged toaster. By the time he can find a socket and start warming the thing up for some good old-fashioned hand burning, you can run far, far away to an entirely different section of the yellow void.

Songs To Let Our Of Your Head

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a "ring tone" the same as a song? Isn't a ring tone just a shortened fragment of a song - the more inane, the better? Maybe this was one of the "old Tom" strips. I really don't understand this at all.

Cheerful Dr. Death Lives On in a Green World of Sickness

This may be a resurgence of the same silly, wacky disease that Ziggy got last month. So what silly, unpronouncable disease does Ziggy have? One of the great joys with this strip is the little games and riddles it throws at you, before giving you the obvious-in-retrospect answers. For example the question of the guru's rapidly-changing behavior saw an answer some time ago, after myriad clues.

The cruel humor gets you reading, then the imaginary games keep you going.

Morose Encounters

As Ziggy undergoes his yearly version of the Hajj to places of deep-seated paranoia and distrust, he runs into an escapee of sorts. The appearance of this otherworldly traveler seems inappropriate considering the timeline of the events in question; could this critter have been crawling for 61 years?

Actually, this little space evader (haw!) has just as much right to call the Earth home as we do; as the child or grandchild of a real tootin' extraterrestrial, he was probably raised here, and is accustomed to all of the trappings of Earth life that survived through that Godforsaken laboratory. At any rate, though it's tough to tell which will be eating the other alive, the fact that this strip is called Ziggy and not Exhausted Nude Green Spaceman affords us a guess.

Ziggy Gets Mugged

This "ATM" boasts a difficult interface, to be sure: no less than twenty plain, gridded white buttons and what appears to be an oversized coin slot. The sheer difficulty of the machine, plus the fact that it's plainly not a real ATM, leads me to believe that perhaps Ziggy's facing down an Automatic Taunting Machine.

Suddenly, a searing shriek fills the heavens and the scene before us shifts:

Adventures in the Blue World of Quotes

. . . However, the other things that come with age - fickle bowels, cataracts, senility and a stubborn commitment to one's viewpoint, however misguided - are mandatory.

Scale the Mountains, View the Plain

"Your weight is 87 pounds. Everybody that you have ever known will someday die. Hurry home, for your house is burning."