7-1-08: There's an interesting concept of the eternal human ovum in that every woman is born with a complete set of human eggs ready to mature along with her, and each egg already contains the information for the next female to come, a child who will also bear these same eggs. Essentially, eggs ready to develop eggs ready to develop eggs, ad infinitum. It's a philosophical concept of the same ovum endlessly replicating itself all the way from the primordial soup until the very end of life on Earth.

Which is kind of sad as reading the Quigmans not only wounds our inner fetus but fetuses until the end of humanity. Nice going, Hick.

PS, you'll notice I didn't make the obvious wire coat-hanger joke. You're welcome.

Sloth alert: This undifferentiated cluster of cells was first expelled from the womb on 3-1-03.

7-2-08: After barking at a can of beets Bob then wandered over to the produce section, sat down against a bushel of kale, and proceeded to lick his testicles for fifteen minutes. He then humped an old lady's leg, took a dump by the magazine rack and marked his territory about fifty times throughout the store. Eventually a small child, startled by these antics, made the mistake of running in terror across Bob's field of vision. By the time the SWAT team's final volley had vaporized Bob's brain there wasn't enough left of the kid to serve on toast.

All I gotta say is, just be careful of those watchdog consumer groups.

Upchuck Update: Bark-barkity-barkin', woofin-bark, barkity 1-8-03, woof-woofin'. Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Yipe!

7-3-08: "In lieu of" does not mean "because of". It means "instead of". You can look it up. While you're there also look up "ignorant dick". It's easy to find, just look for Buddy's picture.

Secondarily, should a comic strip which utilizes a "sophisticated" art style, whose demographic is obviously young adults, be using jokes that a first-grader would scoff at?

"Bummer"? Really? That's the best he can do?

A piece of advice, Buddy... Don't quit your day job. And by the looks of things, it must be cleaning fish because it damn sure ain't creating comic strips.

Sloth Alert: It's worse than you think. Buddy got this joke from a semi-semi-semi-semi-frequent collaborator, someone named Palmer. So that makes this a double "ignorant dick" joke. Yayyy!

7-4-08: It's well known that guys suck in their gut when the ladies stroll by, but where does the gut actually go? It's not like men are pudgy Ken dolls with a secret compartment for stowing batteries or new hairpieces or bulging waistlines when Skipper shows up with her perky pre-adolescent pals comparing press-on tramp stamps underneath their  minimal,  tantalizingly-clingy, polyester bikinis.

<cough>

All I know is, if every man was capable of moving his prodigious beer-gut to another part of his body, it would be to an entirely different head. Need I elaborate?

As for the joke itself, it's remarklably lunkheaded even for the daily papers. Here are the questions it poses:

(1) Who could possibly suck in 300 pounds of gut?
(2) Why does this blubber necessarily go to the head istead of, say, his butt?
(3) Why is the rest of the body still perfectly proportioned?
(4) Why wasn't the whole body sucked into the head?
(5) Why does no one seem to care about Fred's abnormality?

Lastly, just to show how little thought Buddy puts into his cartoons, here's what the scene would have looked like just moments before the malfunction:

You'd think someone who is so accustomed to sucking on a daily basis would better understand the process.

Puke Patrol: This disturbing scenario does not haunt your dreams. It only seems like demented deja vu as it originally appeared on 11-19-03.

7-5-08: Quiz time!

Doonesbury is to Superman as the Quigmans is to _________:

(A) Hawkeye
(B) Aquaman
(C) Matter-Eater Lad

The answer is C, Matter-Eater Lad, as the other two comic book characters actually have marketable skills like shooting arrows and, uh, swimming. Oh yeah, and talking to fish.

Matter-Eater Lad's speciality, on the other hand, is the ability to eat stuff, and there's nothing that bites harder than the Quigmans.

7-7-08: Man to giant rodent: "Sorry, but this cheese is for the mice in these tiny holes. I have a case of aspartame and cyclamate waiting for you in the foyer."

What the hell is going on over at Buddy's house? Although the Quigs, in general, are "comic lite" the only thing I can think of to explain this past week's calvalcade of insipidness is either a gas leak or something involving the cerebral cortex and a large, blunt object. Perhaps a frozen wolverine-on-a-stick or a family-sized box of Grape Nuts.

Adding even more fat to this fire, where did the Times Roman punchlines go? I mean, I like Verdana as much as anyone but what's wrong with a little consistency?

Oh, that's right. Quigmans. Sorry.What was I thinking?

The odd thing about this font change is that syndicated comics are usually submitted in batches of 28, which means half-way through the month's process Buddy switched typeface horses in mid-stream. It's his perrogative to giddyup any way he sees fit but this certainly reeks more of manure than modus.

7-8-08: Life coach? Wow, what a compelling topic. It's right up there with vacuum tube recycling or shoelace manufacturing.

Secondarily, this isn't even a life coach. This is a physical trainer. Life coaches, as I'm told by good old Google, are "Individuals with a background in sociology or psychology, dedicated to helping students achieve their goals by developing their decision-making skills."

The only decision to be made here by Pansy Man is how soon he voids the check for coach's services.

It's understandable why this comic screws the pooch. It's because it's dang difficult to accurately illustrate something as abstruse as a life coach, so Hick took the dumb way out and drew something that was associated with the word "coach". He could just as easily have parked a Greyhound bus or Cinderella's Pumpkin-mobile on Pansy Man's legs.

And, as always, Buddy completely short circuits the so-called 'gag' by making the Pansy Man (Originally called "Sissy Man" when this comic was first syndicated on 10-4-04) look anything LIKE a weakling. I mean, it's damned hard performing sit-ups with someone's foot planted directly across both patellas. Props to PM.

To sum up, this comic should actually be entitled "Obnoxiously Sadistic Trailways Bus".

7-9-08: Have you ever noticed how the Quigmans look a lot like the comic equivalent of Engrish. You know, that curious language, often accompanied by even curiouser and curiouser illustrations, peppering the instructions of Asian-assembled appliances. Like these, for example, from an actual set of instructions for (I swear!) accessing the internet:

1. Enter the on-line neighbor, choose to belong to sex and with opposite should of the native net card conjunction;

2. Native conjunction of right shot, the choice belong to sex, finding out the agreement of INTERNET(TCP/IP)

3. Double click the agreement of INTERNET belong to sexframe, choosing the automation to obtaining the address of IP and obtain the DNS server address assurance automatically;

Compare any Quigmans punchline with the above and you'll see what I mean. Both the Quigmans and these foreign companies could benefit greatly by allowing a professional in their relative fields to get involved in the creative process. All Buddy would have to do is hire a good artist, a good writer, a competent typographer and VOILA! no one would have to laugh at the Quigmans ironically ever again.

For those who expect humor with their Quigmans, here's the only bawdy limerick I could find with the name "Magellan" in it:

There was a young girl of Llewellyn
Whose breasts were as big as a melon.
They were big, it is true,
But her cunt was big, too,
Like a bifocal, full-color, aerial view
Of Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan.

Upchuck Update: This comic debuted on 9-12-01.

7-10-08: Do you know what a "felcher" is? If you have tender a constitution you might want to look away from the following definition:

"Felching is a sexual practice in which semen or other fluids are sucked out of the vagina or anus of a partner."

The term has been around since the 70s and the underground comic scene had a field day with the word, even putting out a comic called "Felch" in 1975. One of the comics, by the famous R. Crumb, featured the Statue of Liberty being felched by "John Q. Public" just after she'd been butt-raped by a capitalist.

Hell of a comment on business-as-usual.

Did Buddy actually try to slide a deviant sexual reference past the American comic reader? I would say definitely so, considering the first appearance of this comic, back in 2002, identified the diapered gentleman as "Stan Fletcher". So it's clear Buddy actually made a conscious decision to use the word. I'm actually surprised he didn't depict Stan playing a rusty trombone while enjoying some donkey punch with his good friend Dirty Sanchez.

And I couldn't live with myself if I failed to question where that thumb's been... or what Stan is doing with that double-ended butt-plug.

Upchuck Update: When this comic debuted on 4-16-02 I was 47 years old so the use of this particular age was not a coincidence. Which makes it doubly stupid that, while changing the name to a more colorful appellation, old Hicky-Pants didn't bother, or remember, to update the age. I am so hurt.

7-11-08: And the audience responds in unison, "If we COULD turn off these voices, asshole, we wouldn't BE schizophrenics."

And it's another fumbled premise for Buddy, who seems to think that movies made about schizophrenics are only attended BY schizophrenics. It makes me wonder what his audience for "The Elephant Man" would have looked like. No doubt peanut sales would have risen dramatically.

Sometimes, less is more. For example, there's a web page or two out there that turn the comic strip "Garfield" into something disturbingly hilarious by removing every annoying remnant of Garfield. You can read the best of them here.

Similarly, this Quigmans gag might have worked if it had simply left out the name of the movie. Think about it.

This gag is also about the kazillionith one Buddy has used at the expense of the physically deformed or mentally disabled. Generally, if the targets of his stellar wit aren't perilously overweight they're mentally incapacitated.

Nice.

Ah, but since Buddy is continually proving incapable of creating original material it's no surprise that this gag was pinch-hit by good old Gygli.

Technical Snark: Does Buddy even know what a real typeface is? Does he not realize that Verdana is a freaking web font?

Kee-rist!

7-12-08: Did you know that your body, especially the forehead, is covered in billions of tiny microorganisms that feed on grease and dead skin flakes? Did you also know that no matter how hard you scrub you can never get rid of them?

It's the same creepy feeling I have knowing the Quigmans are printed in a newspaper each morning. No matter what I do, it's still here.

7-14-08: Buddy bricked the concept of “life coach” last week and now he's blowing his “secret shopper” wad.

Sigh.

You know, sometimes I just feel sorry for the poor, dumb fuck.

(No I don't. Hah!)

The following is a special message for old Hicky-Pants alone as almost everyone already knows what I'm about to reveal. For best effect please assume the following information is being delivered in as patronizing a tone as possible:

A secret shopper is someone who visits businesses and reports back on quality of service. It is NOT someone who buys stuff for you at your behest. That's called a “personal shopper”. I realize, Buddy, that you and computers go together like Karl Rove and common decency but, honestly, even an anenchephalic budgirigar can use Google.

And now back to our critique, which is already in progress.

I see we're still playing peek-a-boo with the fonts again. One day it's Verdana, one day Helvetica, today it's Times Roman. It's almost as if... Crom and Mithra! It's almost as if B-Hick thinks the fonts themselves will make the strip better.

Holy Palatino, Batman!

And now, the best limerick ever written:

There once was a lovely young miss
Who went down the river to read
A young man in a punt
Stuck an oar in her eye
And now the poor girl must wear glasses!

7-15-08: Hi Buddy. I've been generally trashing your strip for the past couple of years because it's easy. Your attempts at humor are so universally pathetic that a blind, quadriplegic marmoset could separate a Quigmans cartoon from a pile of fish guts with its ass and not break a sweat.

But today's Quigmans comic? Well, it deserves special attention, and here it is....


Buddy, you insensitive, inconsiderate (very tiny) dick!

Nine innocent people have died as a result of the recent crane accidents in New York, and many others were injured as well. This was real death, you cretin, the kind of death that arrives out of nowhere and callously snatches away the lives of the luckless, the kind of death we all fear most as it robs of us of that one last chance to say farewell to those we love.

Excepting the truly ghoulish there is nothing. Remotely. Amusing about hundreds of tons of metal and machinery crashing down on innocent, unsuspecting people. Perhaps at some far distant moment in time an adventurous wag will draw a humorous allusion between this unfortunate spate of destruction and George Bush's economic policies and we'll all share a mild chuckle, but right now, you fucking humorless abcess, you useless tumor, there are people still out there grieving over the untimely deaths of their brothers, their sons, their wives, their mothers.

What's really sad is that the soil over the graves of the dead was probably not yet dry from the tears of the deceased's kin when you sat down and created this mindlessly cruel shit-smear of syndicated drivel.

But that's nothing new for you or the Quigmans. You've trafficked in the misery of the dispossessed for decades. It's just that in this case the butt of the joke are those obviously more noble than you, as I sincerely doubt any of them would have laughed at your death.

=mike stanfill=

7-16-08: Friggin'.

Hmph.

Yeah, that's all the proof I need to convince myself that the Quigmans are no longer printed in any newspaper in this country as not one of them would allow the use of the word "friggin'" on the same page as Dolly, Billy and Jeffy in a million years... except for the Oxnard Fucking Daily News. They're special.

How many papers are the Quigmans actually in? Who knows. It's not the sort of thing a syndicate publicly announces unless the strip is doing exceptionally well, like Luann, which is in over 2500 papers worldwide. Then it's a source of pride. When a strip is barely hanging on at 50 papers or less it's better to just cough nervously, focus on a point on the horizon and change the subject.

Oh, look! A squirrel!

Not-so-coincidentally, this leads up to my search for newspapers that are actually carrying the Quigs. In you're interested in helping and, in the process, earning some free stuff, you can find all the details on the Contest page.

Now back to our critique, which is already in progress.

... so funny about some guy in a stolen Fruit-of-the-Loom costume trying to convince a crowd that he's a blastula? I'm just askin'.

Sloth Alert: Funny story... this very same cartoon debuted on 8-2-04, except on that day the word "freakin'" was used  instead of "friggin'". So the logic here is that Buddy thinks "friggin'" is funnier than "freakin'".

What a freakin' friggin' fuckin' genius.

7-17-08: In less enlightened times, like 20,000 BC, the comic strip had yet to be invented. So to achieve the same effect as this racist little confection Buddy Hickerson would have simply resorted to beating someone with a blunt object because they were, in his opinion, 'different'.

"I'm sorry, old bean, but you've dangled your participle at me for positively the last time. I'm afraid I shall have to dent your cranium with this bison femur."

Have you ever thought about the words we use and why we use them or why those damned kids keep coming up with such annoying nonsense? What grammar nazi decided what perfectly constitutes the King's English? Who decided 'ain't' ain't kosher?

In the beginning every new word made by proto-humans could be considered the same as modern-day slang. They simply made it up as they went along, eventually weaving the more useful noises into an elegant vernacular brocade.

Thousand of years later we lost our verbal innocence when certain anal-retentives began assembling the first dictionaries. These resultant omnibi became the 'official' version of our language and everything else was just the other side of the ox-cart tracks. The bourgeoise was vocally cleaved from the proletariat and, thus, verbal racism was born. Slang became the grammatical terrorist.

Oh, sure, the occasional contrived word like 'minivan' or 'WMD' gets added to the official list every now and again but that's just a sop to the antediluvial tide of lingual innovation which washes over us daily. 'Groovy' can currently be found in your nearby Funk & Wagnall's but it gets used about as often as 'antediluvial' these days.

At some point, perhaps millions of years from now, every possible utterance that can emanate from a human will be cross-referenced, catalogued and given a particular definition. Maybe then, and only then, we'll shut up and start listening again.

Regurgitation Report: Buddy be treatin' his homies like a $10 ho', jackin' us wit' dis old shit out from nahn-six-oh-fo. (That's 9-6-04 for all you white folk out there.)

7-18-08: Can you gext cartpal tunnel of the brainb from realding bad cosmic stribps too oqften?

Maybeee ixt juskt me.

So this underage character is at a bar sharing a cocktail with a buxom blond and she's talking about intimate contact between the two of them... is it just me or is this gag REALLY kinda pervy?

7-19-08: In case you don't understand the sub-text...

Francine: "I need to hang up on you, Bob. I don't want to waste my vagina."

Bob: "But we're not fucking."

Francine: "Exactly."

Sloth Alert: Bob Quigman shows up so infrequently it's almost like Buddy is starting to channel him... which he actually is, since this cartoon originally appeared 12-17-01.

7-21-08: Differently? As in "If I hear that sound one more time I'm going to encase his head in plaster of Paris". That kind of "differently"?

Or is it a "Let's add a pointless classical music reference to this punchline so I can look like a total dumbass in an entirely new way" kind of "differently".

So imagine if someone, in all honestly, told you that their snoring resembled Schubert's 8th Symphony. If you're like most people that voted for Bush, twice, your response would probably be: "Sherbert ate what? Sherbert who?"

Now if you were a more worldly person, one with an intimate acquaintance with classical music, your response to the same information would be quite different: "Only if Stephen Hawking was conducting, old bean. Uh-haugh-uh-haugh-uh-haugh."

Now let's suppose you're an average ordinary guy and your best friend in all the world, someone you know is capable of ripping the occasional corker, told you same thing. Your response would probably be more along these lines:

" ............Dude. What are you smokin'?"

Yes, "What are you smokin'?", the universal response to anyone doing  or saying something startlingly moronic. By all rights this should be the official title of the strip.

And might I say, Buddy, what a dynamic tableau you've concocted here. Two people sleeping. Whoo-hoo! Way to push that envelope, baby!

Now, for those of you who are curious you can hear the first movement of Schubert's 8th Symphony here but, except for minor rumblings from the bass section in the opening seconds, very little resembles snoring in the slightest. Were you susprised?

7-22-08: You can put puppies in the oven but that don't make 'em biscuits... Hannibal Lecter!

Cramming a lot of non sequiturs into a script doesn't automatically make them funny... Seth McFarlane!

Cribbing an episode description from TV Guide isn't a joke... Buddy Hickerson!

7-23-08: Welcome back to "What Are You Smokin'?", America's least favorite comic strip. Tonight's mystifyingly pointless guest caricature is Richard Nixon, back from the dead and horrifyingly miscast as "Man engaging in poorly conceived premise" in tonight's production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Bon Mot."

Will the audience accept this dour, poorly-dressed, sunken-chested, chinless, alcoholic, fish-lipped, banana-nosed, prematurely-bald, scowling desecrator of the Constitution as the sort of man capable of multiple romantic assignations or will the audience simply abandon the whole thing in mid

7-24-08: Okay, so this makes four new Quigmans comics in a row. That's Cal Ripken territory by Hickerson standards.

What's most remarkable about these comics, in the sense only that I'm remarking on them and not that they're exceptional in any way, is that they're not exceptional in any way. They all have the same moribund quality of having been the first thing that came to Buddy's mind. It's as though he woke up, had a cup of coffee, squeezed out a dull, brown, lump of corn-enhanced premise while reading the sports page and then settled in for the remainder of the day with Celebrity Rehab and Judge Judy.

As for the comic itself, if I see one more cartoon about a lumpen psychopath desiring to crack open a woman's skull in the imagined belief that a miniature computer is lodged in her prefrontal cortex, one which controls both her voluntary and involuntary emotional and intellectual requirements I, personally, shall hurl.

7-25-08: If only Buddy would hold himself to the "rabid dog" requirement for humor. Sigh.

Okay, it's time for a review. Of the last seven Quigmans cartoons, all of them have portrayed women in, shall we say, a less than positive light. You can find these all in the July edition of the Catharsis section of this site.

Friday 7-18: Depressed barfly in relationship with preschooler bemoans resultant debilitating physical ailments.

Saturday 7-19: Bitter shrew insensitively wipes feet on harmless male acquaintance.

Monday 7-21: Woman succumbs to self-delusion rather than face the truth about her trainwreck of a spouse.

Tuesday 7-22: TV program designed specifically for female a demographic is lampooned.

Wednesday 7-23: Relationships with women are compared to life in prison.

Thursday 7-24: Woman meets a man who wants to split her skull open and root around in her brain.

Friday 7-25: Cute girl senselessly portrayed in stupid cartoon... I mean, needlessly threatened by man wielding rabid dog.

So, uh, Bud... gettin' any? For gawd's sake, how?

7-26-08: It's not so much a sad depiction of modern life as it is an example of Buddy's inability to write a decent gag.

7-28-08: This time Zack knew he was in trouble. The twins had floated away two years ago on the wings of a zephyr out across the Pacific, their bubble a dancing argent capsule against the crimson maw of the setting sun, catching one last glint of moonglow before finally disappearing against the ebon void.

Their bodies were never found.

The last baby was more problematic, having been eventually discovered snared in a live oak tree outside Fargo, his shriveled husk snapping in the hot, western breeze like an old Piggly-Wiggly bag. A family of wrens had built a nest in his soft spot.

Mary took the blame, of course, because she had always loved Zack, felt the need to protect him the way she couldn't protect her children. She would have done hard time if the DA hadn't been possessed of a mild infatuation with Mary's plump breasts and agile mouth. She received deferred adjudication but her breath smelled of feces for weeks. She never talked about it.

This time, though, Zack was on his own. He knew Mary would not again take the fall for his incredible incompetence. There was only one real answer so it didn't surprise Zack as he felt one foot and then the other slowly enter the bath, as though of their own accord. It was with great relief that he felt the soapy water at last wash over him as he settled to the bottom of the tub.

Letting himself go limp he waited quietly for the end to come but gasped as he felt the tug of eternity unexpectedly pluck him from his frost-white, ceramic bier, and he rose skyward in the largest, most beautiful bubble of all. It slowly circled the bathroom, pausing briefly in front of Mary, her eyes full of both regret and acceptance, and then slid out the open window.

The ground rushed away, tumbling end over end, the details of his old life rapidly becoming insignificant. Across the surface of his translucent coccoon a rainbow coruscated fitfully, playing Red Rover with the iridescent sun. All at once a chill overcame him, and darkness played across his eyes. It was in this moment that he understood that we are all just bubbles, playful vessels of life, each one different, each one destined to burst when their time was done, never to come again. This comforted him.

Just before he closed his eyes for the very last time he thought to himself "Thank god I'll never have to read another Quigmans cartoon. God DAMN I hate those things. "

7-30-08: A human has odor?

I'll alert the media.

Sloth Alert: This redolent turd is back for another pass through the digestive system, having originally stunk up the joint on 8-14-03.

7-30-08: Now why would Stan find his girlfriend's laughter so bothersome?

Is he ashamed at himself knowing that he's doomed the little guy to a life of solitary confinement, thereby negating his animal activist label?

Is he annoyed that her stacatto outburst sounds more like a ground squirrel barking out an alarm at passing red-tailed hawks?

Is he alarmed that she's noticed the gerbil had its teeth and claws removed, and that it's covered with KY Jelly and feces, and that it...?

Uh-oh.

I guess there's some things you flinch at and some things you don't. Right, Stan?

Regurgitation Report: Zip-A-Tone shading. The surest sign of an old Quigmans comic, this one dating from 12-26-01.

7-31-08: When the worst comic strip artist in the world creates the worst comic strip gag in the world isn't the universe supposed to fold in on itself or something?

We should all be so lucky.