Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 1, 1992 TAG: 9112310275
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
QUIGMANS' QUIPSTER
Buddy Hickerson returns telephone calls in a way that would make his mother
- or any mother - proud.
"Oh, yeah, that," said the man who created The Quigmans cartoon. "Sometimes
I wait a long time before calling people back. But that's just when I want
them to think I'm really important."
Having a full conversation with Hickerson is something else entirely. His
call-waiting is forever beeping, his doorbell in Dallas forever ringing,
deadlines forever changing.
"I'm starving. Can I call you back after I eat lunch?" he'll ask.
"This stupid magazine needs the artwork by 4."
"[Expletive goes here.] Can I call you later?"
The Quigmans are in more than 70 newspapers now, and occasionally on
magazine covers. They're on cards at the Hallmark store, posing next to dryer
lint and on bumper stickers, part of a campaign to elect Bob, a myopic,
self-deprecating nerd, president. ["At least he wouldn't be greedy," Hickerson
says.]
There is talk, too, of a television situation comedy, he said. "But every
cartoonist talks about that."
All this makes Buddy Hickerson, 33, well, busy.
"Time, time, time, time, time," he said recently, as he put off a phone
call to redo a sketch for a local magazine. He's a stickler for a certain
image.
"A lot of cartoonists whip it out every day," he said, sighing. "I wish I
could do that. I take a long time just to get an expression right."
Time to get the right hopeless look on the face of Bob, the right smirk on
the face of Francine, whom Hickerson says is "a composite mutation of every
woman who ever rejected me."
If only he could redo the folder that contains his publicity materials - a
stubbly chin region with an open smile just above it. "It's Bob, but it
doesn't look like Bob," he said.
The Quigmans - Bob, Francine, Moe and Jowls - were born six years ago in
Denver, where Hickerson had been hired at The Post as a staff illustrator.
"They told me I could do anything I wanted to do," he said. "HA. In the
beginning, I came in late every day, by God you'd better believe it. I took
long lunches."
But then.
Then The Post hired an art director. And the party was over.
"He had this USA Today-style of doing things," Hickerson recalls. "All of a
sudden, I had to do these weather maps. That's one of the reasons I lost my
job, you know, I put the cities in the wrong places. Actually, it was on a map
of Honduras. I didn't think anyone had ever heard of the city. It had a really
long name.
"It was late at night."
Influenced by another illustrator there, who cottoned to "childlike
drawings," the German Expressionists and maybe a few others, The Quigmans
panel began to emerge.
Simple outlines. Crude shapes. Cliches turned sideways.
"Sometimes people come up to me and say things like, `I really like your
cartoon. It's too bad you can't draw,' " Hickerson said. "When they say that,
I think I've succeeded."
And in many ways, he has.
"I almost had a Newsweek cover, but they pulled it. I guess something big
came up."
There is an appeal to his cartoon, he says, because it goes against the
grain. And while that may limit the popularity, his fans, he says, are true.
"I have fans - not a horrible amount of them. It's a good amount, really,
fans aren't horrible. I have one guy who calls me and he sleeps in his car. He
cuts my cartoons out every day. I guess they're his upholstery."
Then there's the Tattooed Biker Lady in California. "She wanted to come out
and live with me," he said.
All this despite the fact that many of his fans think he looks like The
Quigmans. Or worse, he says, acts like them.
"They're surprised, when they meet me, that my head isn't huge and pointy.
And that I'm not fat."
Hickman draws his panels for about a week out of the month. He spends the
rest of the month thinking and writing something to go underneath them.
He groans. "That is the hard part," he said.
A few years ago, he picked up a co-writer, college buddy Mike Stanfille.
["He likes to be called `Puppycrusher.' "]
"At the end of the month we grab humor germs, glean them from TV Guide or
books or anything."
Their thinking process works something like this: You find a cliche, you
turn it around. For instance, if a man thinks he's God's gift to women, why
can't you return him? For a toaster?
"And if you have a milk cow, why can't you have an evaporated-milk cow. I
drew this skull being milked . . . Oh well, I guess you had to see it.
"Or, if you have the saying `No man is an island,' than I can say `Bob
discovers that he is, indeed, an island.' Other times you have to push it
around and try things. Actually, then you just try to rhyme it, and that's a
last resort."
Hickerson grew up an Army brat. When he was in high school, the so-called
formative years, he traveled with his father to Turkey.
"It was an eye-opening experience to be in the midst of that alien culture.
And there was no TV. I learned to get away from TV."
Back in his hometown in Texas, he said, he would watch the Flintstones and
then draw the Flintstones, and so on.
For his first paying job, Hickerson says, he drew Richard Nixon as a member
of the rock group Kiss. "Who's the one with the tongue? Gene Simmons."
"No, wait," he says a minute later. "The first thing I drew was a little
boy standing in front of the class for show and tell. He looked like a young
Johnny Carson.
Pause.
"Say the Nixon-as-Kiss thing. It sounds better."
Hickerson is not rich.
"I have a pool, yeah, but it belongs to my apartment complex," he said.
In time, maybe. For The Quigmans are still young.
They've changed some since they were first drawn. For one thing, Hickerson
says, they're not quite as fat now.
"I don't know why they're fat. I like volume." They have such tiny feet, he
says, "to emphasize their girth. As if you didn't notice they were already
obese. I call it `the bloated and tapered style.' But they've slimmed down
over the years."
A good thing, he said. "You never see really fat people on a sitcom.
"Or wait. There's Roseanne."