Gettin' Ziggy Wit It!

Some of you may recall that bizarre month or so period in May when I became semi obsessed with trying to comprehend the nonsensical awfulness of Ziggy comics. Fortunately I had all but given up on attempting to decipher their surreal, confusing, and often times, depressing attempts at "humor" before my head exploded; leaving behind a tentatively implied promise that I would Zig no more forever. Without the maddening task of trying understand the sad adventures of that deformed, half man I slowly started sleeping regularly again and my intense frustration headaches had all but ceased. I was well on my way back to pre-Ziggy normalcy.

Alas, in this cold, imperfect world we live in, the cruel arbitrary wheel of fortuna constantly brings us up and down. Just the other week, while killing time in class randomly going across the online comics for the first time in weeks, I was violently dragged back to the nightmarish one paneled madness that was Ziggy:

Aside from how completely humorless and trite this feeble attempt at "contemporary" comedy is, it's even more awful when you recall back to the comic from my last Ziggy entry:

Almost four months and it's nearly the same panel! You know what the really sad thing is? The recent one is actually a vast improvement when compared to the original. After looking up exactly what a push-poll was, it sort of made sense (at least more sense then a shell screaming "virus alert")!

Of course I'm not well versed enough in the decades upon decades of Ziggy lore (nor would I care to) so maybe this whole "talking or listening to out of context messages at the beach from a shell" thing is actually a long running Ziggy conceit like the doctor's office or the complaints department. If that's the case and this minimal amount of all around effort and quality is all that is required to produce a nationally syndicated comic for nearly 40 years, then hats off to you cartoonist Tom Wilson, you have found one of the greatest jobs in the world.

Here's a freebie you can use for next week on the house: