Pugad Baboy (literally, "swine's nest" in Tagalog) is a comic strip created by Filipino cartoonist Apolonio "Pol" Medina, Jr. The strip is about a Manila community of mostly obese people – "fat as pigs" (baboy is Tagalog for pig).
It started appearing in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on May 18, 1988, and was published exclusively in the Inquirer line of newspapers (Broadsheet Inquirer and its free concise sister tabloid called Inquirer Libre and tabloids Bandera and Tumbok.) Its popularity has spawned numerous compilations, a live-action television series, and merchandise such as T-shirts and figurines.
The strip not only showcases domestic life; occasionally, it features adventure, drama, and pure spoof sequences. More often, the strip mirrors the general sentiment of the Filipino people on relevant topics such as corruption in the government as well as Filipino pop culture. In this respect, the strip has been likened to Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury. Sometimes, political satire is woven into some ordinary strips and adventure stories.
History
Medina conceived the strip while working under contract in Iraq in 1986. On May 18, 1988, he pitched his strips to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. His strip, named after a friend's piggery in Bulacan, was accepted on the spot.
Medina originally spelled "Pugad Baboy" with a hyphen in the strip itself, though not in the title.
For many years, the strip was exclusively a black-and-white daily. A full-color Sunday strip in the same paper debuted on October 3, 2004. The full-colored strips ended their run sometime in 2009. Before the tabloid Inquirer Libre debuted, the strip appeared exclusively in the Inquirer broadsheet.
In a strip published in September 2006, Medina commented on online life substituting for physical contact. He mentioned Wikipedia as one of the alternatives to library visits, the other being Google.
The Inquirer decided to discontinue carrying Pugad Baboy in its comics section beginning June 5, 2013, after a strip for the June 4 edition reportedly lambasted hypocrisy among Christians against homosexuals when certain sectarian schools condone such students among their ranks. The newspaper later clarified that the cartoonist was not actually fired and the strip would just be suspended from publication until an internal investigation had been carried out. However, Medina officially resigned from the paper on June 7, 2013. Online news website Rappler later hired him, with the strip being published as a webcomic on the site starting June 17, 2013. The new version offers readers alternative punchlines with the respective voting options.
Its final strip on Rappler, depicting a portal, appeared on March 1, 2018. The strip returned to print media with its first appearance in the Philippine Star and its sister publications, Pilipino Star Ngayon and Pang-Masa, on March 5, 2018.
Characters
The Sungcals
The Sungcal family reflects aspects of traditional and stereotypical families, with a housewife and an overseas contract worker as members, with a domestic helper to supplement. "Sungkal" is a Tagalog word for the term "digging a hole with a (pig's) snout".