"How's the Squid?" by Jack Ziegler

New Yorker regular Jack Ziegler's new collection of food cartoons, How's the Squid?, is some tasty ink indeed.

Like recent Cullum collections, Abrams publishes a lovely volume of 122 Ziegler offerings to satisfy any cartoon appetite.

Take the man running from an ice cream cone hailstorm with the caption "Who among us dares tempt the wrath of Ben & Jerry?"

Or the restaurant patron being eyed by an angry chef as he reads a 'misfortune cookie' reading "You're next!"

But by far my favorite cartoon in the collection has to be on page thirty-two. A woman, man and child are looking at a toaster and its newly burnt toast. The top of the cartoon reads "Fatalism..." The woman says "It is God's will." The man remarks "Had the toast been destined to be edible, it would be so." And the child says "B-b-but..." followed by another caption reading "and the seeds of doubt."

To be honest, I'm not sure exactly why this is so funny, but I laughed out loud for approximately two minutes after reading it the first time. A really big loud laugh. My wife chortled and guffawed too, but neither of us can explain why it works.

I think that's representative of a lot of Ziegler's work. Somehow he defies cartoon convention and finds laughs where no one knew to look.

Cartoon and cooking fans alike would do well to add How's the Squid? to their humor menu.

Mark Anderson is a professional cartoonist whose family and business cartoons appear in publications nationwide.