1 [caption]: Japan...
1 [sign]: {on an ice cream stand, attended by a robed monk} Zen Ice Cream
1 Steve: A vanilla cone, thanks mate.
2 Monk: We have ice cream today, so we can give you none.
3 Monk: If you come back tomorrow, we will have no ice cream, so we can give you some.
4 Steve: Crikey! What was that?
4 Monk: An ice cream koan.

Do not confuse a cone with a koan.

I assume it's obvious enough from the previous strip showing Steve and Terry* that this is a flashback sequence. If not, I'm telling you now, so you have no excuse.

* i.e. Ignoring the Charity Collector Guy in Rome.

The photo is a public domain image of another cone.

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2016-07-20 Rerun commentary: In the 10 seconds or more that this conversation would require to take place, the bullet train in the background would have covered at least 800 metres, and quite possibly a kilometre or more. Since I had a static photo of Mount Fuji with the train in front of it, I employed some slight trickery to give the impression that it wasn't simply frozen there.

I zoomed in from the first panel to the second, thus putting the nose of the train closer to the right edge of the panel, creating a subtle illusion that it had moved to the right since the first panel. And then in the third and fourth panels I continued moving right edge of the background to the right, until in the last panel you can't see the nose of the train at all, so there's no point of reference to show that it isn't really moving. The result is - I hope - that at first glance your subconscious accepts that the train is moving from panel to panel.