This is a Picasso feature, but not a comic!

Children, have you ever heard the story of Papa Higgins’ bacon? You don’t even know who Papa Higgins was ? Well, this is a greater tragedy than I originally thought.

You see, Papa Higgins, Papa was his first name, was friends with this man named Picasso. This was back in olden times, when men wore hats. Higgins and Picasso liked each other a lot, but Picasso was a pretentious bigot who worked in a cookie factor, and didn’t want all of his other, fancy friends to see him with Higgins, who was nothing more than a low paid investment banker. Every night, Higgins would wait for Picasso to get off work, hiding in the shadow cast by a fat anthropomorphic hippo that stood at the corner panhandling. He watched until Picasso had finished saying goodbye to all of his better friends, like a young Mr. Robert Nesay, who would later give birth to a boy named Hobart in another dimension, and then he went over to meet him. They spent the rest of the night partying up a storm, painting the town all sorts of colors. Sometimes they went to the arcade. Other times, they had matches with Higgins’ marbles. Other than the blatant elitism on Picasso’s part, they were good times.

One day, though, Picasso started hanging out with a new friend from the gutter. This friend had no name, and he was vaguely gelatinous. Higgins was mad. He rushed over to Picasso and started beating him, asking why he was willing to be seen with something like a blob, and not someone nice and respected like Higgins was.

“I work in a cookie factory, Higgins!” Picasso shouted. “You can’t do this to me!”

But Higgins kept beating Picasso, and the blob watched and feigned interest. Finally, after several minutes, Picasso started to get angry. He used his special powers to turn himself in to a wild mongoose, and started biting and scratching at anything that was exposed at Higgins. Bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts, Higgins had to back down.

“Why, Picasso, why? Aren’t we good friends? Aren’t I better than a sewer blob that wasn’t even named by his own parents? Why won’t you be seen with me?” Higgins asked, in tears on the ground.

“Because Higgins,” Picasso said, “you are made of bacon, and people just wouldn’t understand.”

Higgins looked down at himself, and saw it was true. He was nothing more than a giant walking side of bacon. All this time, he had thought he was human. Sulking, he limped away from his friend Picasso without another word, leaving him to hang out with his blob friends.

Higgins spent several months locked in his apartment. Picasso called a few times, but Higgins never answered the phone. Eventually, everyone forgot Higgins even existed. When the cookie factory closed, and Picasso was without any sort of meaningful employment, Higgins never noticed. He spent those many hours alone in his tiny bedroom, mulling over what he had to do.

Finally, it came to him. Higgins wandered over to the kitchen, and tossed himself on the stove. After only a few hours, he was cooked through and through. With his last gasping breaths, he dragged himself to where he knew Picasso would be…hanging out with his friends in the old park. Sure enough, there was Picasso, along with Robert Nesay and the Unnamed Blob. Flopping down at Picasso’s feet, Higgins said his last words: “Eat me! It is the only way we can be together forever!”

Then he died.

Picasso wasn’t very hungry, and neither was Unnamed Blob, so they let Robert Nesay eat him. It was a good thing, too, since Higgins bacon was very strange indeed. Upon eating it, Robert was sucked into a dimension populated by Japanese videogame stereotypes.

Years later, his son with a doe eyed, blue-haired girl was snapped back into this dimension, after the effects of Higgins’ bacon on his system wore off. That man was Hobart Nesay, man of a thousand jobs, few words, and total apathy.

And that is the story of Papa Higgins’ bacon. Next time someone tells you about Higgins, remember him as a damn tasty meal with a very interesting spicy kick. Sadly, even among his old friends, he is mostly forgotten. Even Hobart is oblivious, as his father never told him of how he came to be in this dimension…and the story of how Robert died will have to wait for another day.