Ziggy

Smithers: (reading Ziggy strip) So Ziggy goes to the repair shop ... there's a sign on the doorbell reading `Out of Order'!
Mr. Burns: Ah, Ziggy, will you ever win?

—The Simpsons

Ziggy is a comic strip originally drawn by Tom Wilson. It is a one-panel strip on dailies, and a sequential on Sundays. The strip is a Long Runner, having run in newspapers since 1971. The strip focuses on the eponymous character, a human of some sort who lives at home by himself with his cat, dog, parrot and fish.

Tropes used in Ziggy include:

• Ascended Fanon: Ziggy's finally gaining pants.
• Butt Monkey: Ziggy.
• Crapsack World: Quite often in the early strips.
• Freudian Couch
• Funny Animal: Ziggy's parrot talks to him regularly. It is also implied that the cat and dog can talk to him.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Okay, he's a human (supposedly), that's still an animal. But why doesn't he wear pants?! Or have a crotch?
  • In December 2009, Pearls Before Swine addressed this issue in an arc in which Rat leads others in protesting Ziggy's pantslessness.
    • It gets better. Stephen Pastis gave Tom Wilson a heads-up about the issue, and the same week Ziggy broke with tradition and started wearing pants.
• Long Pants: One possible answer to the above before Ziggy actually started wearing them.
• Merchandise-Driven: So much so in the 1980s.
• The Movie: Ziggy's Gift, directed by Richard Williams.
• No Fourth Wall: In one strip, Ziggy addresses the reader, saying that if he or she thinks life is hard, he or she should try living in a 3×3½-inch panel.
• Outlived Its Creator: Tom Wilson died in 2011. His son, Tom Wilson Jr., now draws the feature after collaborating with Dad for several years.
• Sadist Show: Everyone, including his own parrot, is cruel or snarky to Ziggy.
• Totally Radical: Most of the pop culture references are already ages old by the time Ziggy gets around to covering them. His computer is depicted as being a late-1970s modular type (much like an Apple IIe).
• Walking Techbane: Many 1990s and 2000s gags deal with Ziggy's incompetence with the computer.