7-5-07: If the speaking character in this gag had been a beaver he might have remarked he "doesn't give a dam anymore". Or if he'd been a dog he could say that life is "ruff". Of course a cat could be "rubbed the wrong way", or a mouse could be "cheesed", or a sloth might opine that his life had been "turned upside down". But guess what? None of those 'punch line's' would have been funny, either.

BTW, what's with the guy on the left? Is this charming specimen not about two snorts shy of a really serious postal exploit? Did we really need some psycho with a 40-yard-stare to accentuate the negative? I mean, seriously, would the joke not have benefited by a little empathetic pulchritude? A little eye candy? You know, some babes.

Oh, that's right, I forgot...women characters in the Quigmans are only used to represent some loathsome female stereotype. My bad.

7-6-07: Can you say "bitch"? Yes, it's all about the subtext.

Yesterday, when I mentioned that women characters in the Quigmans were only used to represent some ghastly female stereotype, I was only hinting at the strip's not-so-latent misogynistic bent. Little did I know it would take old Hick exactly one day to make me look like a regular Delphinic oracle.

Yeah, I know, it's just a cartoon, but you never see Blondie Bumstead on all fours gnawing feverishly at her own ass. Although, come to think of it, I'd buy that for a dollar.



Regurgitation Report: This cartoon last appeared 12-14-99.

7-7-07: I wrote this gag for Buddy back in the late 80's/early 90s. You can see the original by clicking here, scanned from one of ye olde Quigman books.

I often wonder why old Hick bothers to re-draw these cartoons (contrast and compare) unless, possibly, the originals are buried under a steaming mass of his smegma-encrusted underpants in the corner of his bedroom. (I've seen it. It's not pretty.)

7-9-07: Sooo, putting an "i" in front of real or imagined words like "flappy"(?!) makes a statement humorous? Keen! Let's try it:

"Four iscore and iseven iyears ago, our iforefathers brought iforth upon this icontinent a new ination."

Hmm. Ain't working. I musta busted the isumbitch.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go ipuke in my itoilet to get this stupid icartoon out of my ibrain before I iclaw my iballs out of my ihead.

Note: As in the Quigman cartoon from 7-5-07 (see above) the 2nd banana in this joke is reacting in a way that would be more suited to the diagnosis of terminal cancer rather than simple despair from the realization that you're in a comic created by incompetents.

7-10-07: I wonder if this mope would have been equally disappointed had he been reading Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" and discovered that it contained neither hills nor elephants, just some guy yakking about "letting the air in". That would have been quite the laugh riot, too, no doubt.

Hey, look! It's our old friend Mr. "40-Yard-Stare". I'm happy to see that he's somehow managed to make bail. I wonder if he's met Ms. "40-yard-stare" yet? (see above)

You know, I used to have people write me and say that they enjoyed the Quigmans because it was "drawn funny". And I agreed. It WAS drawn funny, in the same way that a broken arm LOOKS funny and, oddly enough, elicits about the same amount of laughter as any contemporary Quigman cartoon.

7-11-07: What I've been advised by many comic syndicate editors is to write about situations that anyone can relate to and then make them funny. That's why we see so many topics about babies and iPods in the comics and very few about Pascal's triangle/factorials.

That having been said, IKEA furniture is designed to be assembled by the very lowest of lowest common denominators, so logic then suggests that we're supposed to identify with a man who apparently has an IQ approximating that of gum.

Uh, yeah.

Oh well, at least there's always Marmaduke to cheer us up.

Finally, I hate to keep bringing this up but does anyone ever smile in the Quigmans any more? Even the guy winning the freaking Nobel Prize looks like he could use a little extra bone marrow.

Sloth alert: This gag originally used on 2-6-06. You can see the original here.

7-12-07: They say you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats the waiter or, in this case, a minor celebrity. Any normal, well-adjusted male might respond to Dr. Phil thusly, "That's very kind of you, sir, but this lovely woman happens to be my wife". Having said that I'm guessing that this young lady should start getting used to a steady diet of knuckle sandwich served with a side order of low-fat mental cruelty.

Ah, l'amour!

7-13-07: What really makes a cartoon memorable is pairing a hard-hitting social statement with a well-delineated, emotionally-charged drawing and, uh...oh, that's right. This is a Quigman comic. Sorry.

Sloth Alert: This cartoon originally used June 14, 2002.

7-14-07: This cartoon is kind of a lesson in how to take an already lame gag and make it even less funny through the use of awkward dialogue. So take note, all you future syndicated cartoonists.

Sloth Alert: This cartoon originally aired February 2, 2006. Click here to see that version. The difference is very slight, just a quick date of publication alteration.

7-16-07: It's pretty clear that old Hick occasionally resorts to the use of joke-writing software, probably something Microsoft cranked-out while they waited for the Justice Department to be infiltrated by neocons, to develop his 'gags'. In this case, the program has evidently become confused by the various shades of the word "garnish", meaning to both "add" and "remove".

It might have made better sense if the waiter had delivered a pizza with few slices gone, and was actually eating a slice as he mentioned the garnishment. Or how about if the IRS had garnished his date? Wackiness would have ensued. Actually, this should have been the "IRS Cafe" where your steak is "well-done", "garnished", or "seized".

No, don't bother to thank me. I'm exist but  to serve.

Sloth Alert: This cartoon originally aired July 21, 2003.

7-17-07: A few questions, if I may:

(1) Who is narrating this? Is it the onion? Wouldn't doubt it, the snarky little sod.
(2) Do they still even MAKE Salad Shooters?" (Answer: Yes. But since this joke is about 20 years old it really doesn't matter.)
(3) Doesn't a Salad Shooter chop veggies up into little tiny bits? The debris field illustrated here looks more like a giant bunny threw up.
(4) Did Hick HAVE to draw the carrot so near Bob's pelvis? I sense that somewhere there's a nun sharpening her ruler.
(5) "Carnivore-boasting"?

Sloth Alert: Originally syndicated 6-26-01

7-18-07: I wrote this gag so it is, of course, perfect in every way. Old Hicky-poo seems to think so too as he's re-used the very same cartoon at LEAST four times, probably five, since its creation. Click here for a scan of the cartoon as it appeared in one of the Quigman books circa 1992.

This version is a cruddy scan probably from that very same Quigman book (the moire pattern on the Zip-A-Tone is a dead give-away). The only change is that it's been cropped a little, a crappy new border has been added and, oh yes, my name was whited-out from the signature line.

Thank you, Buddy. Thank you so very, very, very, very much.

7-19-07: And after this diagnosis the doctor lifted his leg and scent-marked the guy, you know, just in case any other gastroenterologist's came sniffing around. This is the double-benefit of having a canine doctor as they always bring along their own pee, just in case you forget yours.

On second thought, let's reassess this diagnosis and this punch line. A veterinarian wouldn't normally consider a cold nose on a dog reason for concern, so why would a dog doctor find a warm nose on a human unusual?A cold nose on the human would have been the more logical hair to split, no?

Sloth alert: This gag originally syndicated 10-14-03

7-20-07: It's funny how comics begin to resemble their creators. This one, for instance, is unamusing and mean-spirited. (Yes, it was written by "McHugh" but the editorial process stops at the Hickster.)

7-21-07: This cartoon was originally syndicated on 7-26-01, which means that old Hick is recycling garbage about recycling garbage. It's synchronicity, baby!

7-23-07: Here's my guess about this one....Hicky-pants had probably watched his dog pinch a loaf on the neighbor's lawn a thousand times, so I'm supposing that he thinks his dog will some day magically extrude a Lincoln Continental instead of the usual fecal mass. It sounds stupid but it makes about as much sense as this gag.

Nitpick Nathan Says:"Only moth's emerge from cocoons. Butterflies emerge from a chrysalis. You can look it up, ya pinheads!"

Sloth Alert: This gag originally used 7-22-03, almost exactly four years ago. Oddly enough, in that iteration Bob had only watched the butterflies a measly hundred times. Guess he's been practicing since then.

7-24-07: At first glance you'd think this was just another in a long series of "men as  insensitive oaf" jokes, but it's more subtle than that. Actually, it cameos yet another representative female caught in the famous Quigman Misogyny Field. "After all" the artist thinks, "Why approach the subject of miscommunication among the sexes in a witty and inventive fashion when I can instead celebrate boorish passive-aggressiveness with some anonymous bimbo as the fall guy?"

This cartoon may just as well have portrayed the guy chucking rabid wolverines at the girl's head since that particular horror is seemingly what both her eyes and posture describe.

Sloth Alert: This gag originally used 4-22-03.

7-25-07: This is one of those very rare days when old Hick manages to cough up a gag that chokes a very brief spurt of appreciation from very deep within the bowels of my very black heart. However, I'm reassured that the ham-fisted status quo remains intact by the jumbo dose of hostility the guy manifests towards his house mate. After all, what's a Quigman without some disposable female character acting as a visual doorstop for another entirely superfluous example of male rage.

7-26-07: This management technique is, of course, SOP in the Bush White House but, still and all, you'd need a magnetic resonance imager the size of Dick Cheney's firing arc to coax the slimmest margin of jest out of this situation. Unfortunately for us comic readers, Buddy prefers to simply poke at the carcass of the shtick with a stick.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, made a mint by concentrating his editorial slant towards intra-office operations. Yet even on his worse day, which might conceivably include cancer/marital discord/alien invasion, Adams could somehow conjure up an inventive take on the bureaucratic morass which currently exemplifies corporate America without breaking a sweat. If this is the very best the Quigmans can offer then perhaps it should stick to fat jokes.

Sloth Alert: This cartoon originally used 8-4-2000. It wasn't funny then, either.

7-27-07: The shapeless mass in this cat's dish could either be a ball of hair or a wolverine turd or a Republican's heart, but for the purpose of this gag let's assume that it's simply cat food. With this supposition in hand it's hard to figure why the cat would be dissatisfied. After all, what else would it expect to find in its bowl?

Please understand that I use the word "cat" figuratively as this abomination is so ineptly delineated it could very well be any of a hundred possible vertebrates. Perhaps if we'd seen the hind-quarters of this demon-spawn we'd have more evidence to go on but old Hicky-pants, though having plenty of room for the entire figure, literally half-assed this drawing.

As a final shot across the aesthetic bow, why is the "cat" glaring at the name of the syndicate and not the dish of cat food in question? I prefer to think this mutation is trying to tell us who's really to blame for this artistic fiasco.

Sloth Alert: This cartoon originally used 11-15-03. It wasn't funny then, either.

7-28-07: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to say goodbye to a dear friend. It is with great sadness that I say that Buddy Hickerson's sense of humor... is dead.

<Sob>

I'm sorry. I told myself I wouldn't do this.

<Sniff>

I'm fine now. Let us continue.

His sense of humor... is no more.  It has ceased to be. Once the greatest comic talent in the world, it was also the essence of compassion, a standard-bearer for the downtrodden, a snappy dresser, and a philanthropist which gave millions to charity but never allowed the fact to be mentioned.

A philosopher, a soldier, an Olympic gold-medal winning fencer, a Nobel Prize winner, a published poet, and an incarnate lama....all of these lived nearby it. For decades it was the spiritual advisor to kings and archbishops, and it even had sex with Mamie Eisenhower.... twice. It was, my friends, absolutely indispensable as a daemon of divertissement.

We must ask ourselves this...now that its sun has set, how can we, the humor-deprived public, possibly go on? The answer, as difficult as it may be to admit, is just about anything. Yes, cereal packets, tampon instructions, fine-print legalese in rental agreements,fecal-encrusted stock summations at the bottom of bird-cages, all will offer substantially higher merriment levels than this once-heralded syndicated juggernaut that died far too late. May it rest in peace.

Thank you.

Sloth Alert: This cartoon originally used 12-14-01.

7-30-07: There's nothing like a joke that uses a good logic flow to tell its story...but this ain't one of them.

I mean, I may be just a babe in the woods here but I seriously doubt competing phone companies have the ability to add features to your existing service.

Besides, I think this guy ought to invest in some doors and windows before he considers ponying up for caller I.D. He also might like to talk to an orthopedist about that shattered left humerus. The pain must be intolerable. Small wonder he's peeved.

And is that table on the ground? In the corner? An extrusion from the 17th dimension?

Sloth Alert: Originally syndicated 5-24-2000.

7-31-07: This very same Quigman comic debuted in 1989, the same year as Tim Burton's "Batman", the same year as the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, of Tiananmen Square, and (Praise the lord!) the end of the reign of Ronald Reagan. It was also the same year that the comic strip Dilbert was syndicated, that Disney's "Little Mermaid" was released, and that the TV show Seinfeld premiered.

But 1989 was best remembered as being the last year that the golden toad was ever seen.

Yes, it was that long ago.


Click here for a scan of the original cartoon as it appeared in a Quigmans book, circa 1990.