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    Ernie Quinch

    Character » Ernie Quinch appears in 65 issues.

    Ernest Errol Quinch is an alien delinquent and best friend of fellow ne'er-do-well D.R., created by Alan Moore and Alan Davis.

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    Origin

    Quinch is an alien delinquent who is generally to be found creating mayhem in the company of his best friend, D.R.

    Creation

    D.R. and Quinch were created by Alan Moore and Alan Davis, initially for a one-off short Time Twister story in 2000A.D. Prog 317, "D.R. and Quinch Have Fun on Earth". Moore based DR and Quinch on the characters of OC and Stiggs from National Lampoon. An instant hit, the pair were brought back to star in their own series of four additional stories from Prog 350. They also had a one-shot story in 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 1985.

    Backstory

    Backstory

    Waldo "Diminished Responsibility" Dobbs is an alien delinquent with an IQ of 280. After being released from reform school he enrolled in college and befriended fellow student Ernest Quinch, a certified psychotic deviant who shared his love of guns, explosives and fighting, together nuking the Phi-Delta Frat House.

    DR and Quinch Have Fun On Earth

    Ernest Errol Quinch is an alien delinquent of few words (generally he simply agrees with his more loquacious best friend Waldo "Diminished Responsibility" Dobbs with a brief "S'Right"), though his writings evidence that he's in no way dim, just taciturn. The son of a skyscraper sized, immensely rich mother who travels between worlds in an immense space palace, he proved to like guns and enjoy starting fights. Sent to a psychiatrist, he was diagnosed as being emotionally deprived, as everyone hated him thanks to his tendency to terrorise people who had done him no harm, with accordant behavioural abberations, and a psychotic deviant, though Quinch insisted that didn't make him a bad person. At college Quinch met his best friend, DR Dobbs, who had just been released from reform school. His high IQ and love of blowing things up made Quinch respect him totally, and they together nuked the Phi-Delta Frat House. In the summer of local year '315 (3017 AD by human reckoning) Dean Fusk found lasers and stolen furs in Quinch's locker, suspended the pair and reported them to the police.

    Knowing from the Dean's constant boasting about the money he frequently donated to the League of Disadvantaged Planets' charity, DR came up with a convoluted revenge plan. He and Quinch "borrowed" the Dean's credits chips, rented a time-flivver and picked a despicable scum-hole planet in the boondocks that nobody really cared about (Earth) and traveled back into that planet's prehistory, working their way forward in time reshaping its geography with thermonuclear devices, visiting the Pleistocene where Quinch taught prehistoric man how to hit one another with bits of bone, visited the survivors in the Palaeolithic where Quinch posed for cave paintings, tried to explain the concept of space travel to the ancient Egyptians but found the locals misunderstood and instead just built a lot of "pointy buildings" (pyramids) for them. In 1883, while trying to refine some of the geographical changes they had made, Quinch accidentally used the wrong shell on Krakatoa, making a somewhat bigger bang than planned, then gradually they gave mankind the idea to go into space, inspiring Newton to discover gravity (via DR throwing apples at his head till he got the idea), accidentally destroying several planes near Bermuda with their tractor beam while trying to bring them closer to examine, and giving close encounters to isolated humans in the 1950s. They covertly watched as Neil Armstrong took his first step onto the moon, with Quinch jokingly leaving a banana peel where Armstrong's foot first landed to trip him up, which NASA subsequently edited out of the footage. After some final fine tuning of Earth's surface, triggering the San Andreas Fault in 1991 to remove an unwanted chunk of America, the pair returned home to find that, as planned, humanity was finally making contact with DR and Quinch's civilization late in the summer of '315.

    As anticipated the Dean and his family attended the reception thrown by the League for the newcomers, but when the Earth was displayed on holographic projectors to the attendees, they discovered Earth's continents spelled out a series of insults and criminal accusations against Fusk and his family in their native Centravian. The League had Earth swiftly atomized for the affront, but Fusk suffered a nervous breakdown, and DR and Quinch subsequently convinced their suspension hearing that Fusk was a crook who had planted the incriminating evidence in their lockers, winning their way back into school.

    DR and Quinch Go Straight

    The pair's many crimes - "arson, kidnapping, theft, grievous wounding, possession of unlawful atomic weapons, taking and driving away, conspiracy to overthrow the government, coveting thy neighbour's ox, graverobbing, torture, criminal libel, blackmail, polluting the environment, shoplifting, 714 separate driving offenses, forging sacred relics, transmuting base metal into gold, genocide, spitting, and thirty-two offenses so unusual and horrible they do not have names" - seemed to catch up with them and they were put on trial and sentence by Judge Moxlob Thorkwung, but DR pleaded that they were disadvantaged students who had merely known no better, convincing Thorkwung to give them a month to demonstrate they possessed some decency by doing some charitable work, and if they succeeded, then he might reduce their final sentences by a century.

    DR and Quinch immediately launched on a Machiavellian revenge plot, buying the house next door to Thorkwung using a grant from the charities commission and turning it into Massacre House, where unbalanced and lethal ex-servicemen mentally scarred from fighting the Ghoyogi in the recently ended Ghoyogi Slime Jungle Wars, such as their friend Horatio Pulger, could play with guns and explosives for therapeutic purposes. With Thorkwung already apoplectic upon learning of his new neighbors with their land mines in the garden and late night mortar firing, DR then invited the Ghoyogi ambassador to send a diplomatic party to visit the "Massacre House Universal Peace and Love Initiative," then the mayor to visit the official opening the same day. When the mayor arrived, he congratulated DR and Quinch on their noble endeavor to look after the welfare of old soldiers, but DR redirected the praise, citing Thorkwung as the person who had suggested the whole thing. The mayor congratulated Thorkwung, who hesitantly accepted it, then surreptitiously apologised to DR for misjudging him, agreeing to cancel DR and Quinch's sentences in return for them not telling the mayor the truth. DR accepted, and Thorkwung immediately used his keyphone to arrange their acquital and wipe their crimes from the records, mere moments before the Ghoyogi arrived. Deciding it was a surprise Ghoyogi assault, Pulger led his fellow veterans in an attack, obliterating the diplomatic party and much of the neighborhood. In the aftermath Thorkwung was arrested, charged with responsibility for the Massacre House Massacre and the war with Ghoyogi officially restarted allowing a grateful Pulger and his veteran friends to re-enlist.

    DR and Quinch Go Girl Crazy

    When Quinch went over to borrow DR's flamethrower one evening, he discovered to his shock and growing horror that his friend was now dating the new drama coach's daughter, Chrysoprasia, and had remodeled himself as well mannered and straight laced to fit her illusion of him, even becoming the romantic co-lead with her in her father's new play, "The Bleating Heart." DR tried to cover for his friendship with Quinch by telling Chrysoprasia that Quinch was in the slow reading group at college and that DR had volunteered to help him with his studies.

    Unwilling to lose his best friend, Quinch kidnapped Chrysoprasia and subjected her to home movies of his and DR's past depravities, hoping to convince her to dump DR. Instead she went insane, deciding she was unworthy of the true DR and trying to remake herself in his image as Crazy Chryssie. With a somewhat perturbed Quinch in tow she invaded the opening performance of Bleating Heart with guns blazing, but found DR annoyed that she had interrupted his performance rather than won over by her new attitude. When the police arrived and asked the atypically respectable looking DR whether Quinch or Chryssie was responsible for the chaos, he pointed them to his now ex-girlfriend, who was led away begging for him to wait for her. Unsure how he could have fallen in love with such a hideous being, DR concluded he had been the victim of temporary insanity caused by trace chemicals in a recent takeaway meal, and Quinch reaffirmed their friendship by giving DR a thorium bomb tactical thermonuclear weapon with which to avenge himself on the restaurant in question.

    DR and Quinch Get Drafted

    DR and Quinch were subsequently drafted to fight in the Ghoyogi Slime Jungle Wars they had restarted. Deciding to make the most of it, the pair were initially happy at the thought of access to all the military's weapons, but found basic training under NCO Sergeant "Ribsnapper" Rorchmutt disappointing due to them using dummies for weapons practice instead of actual Ghoyogians. Swiftly stationed to the Slime Jungles of Ghoyogi, DR wrote to Quinch's mother asking her to buy them out of the conflict.

    While waiting for a response DR and Quinch were sent out on jungle patrol, but walked in a circle; coming back on their own camp, DR assumed it was the enemy's and opened fire with a bazooker nuke. An unamused Rorchmutt ordered them locked up in cubicle fifteen with the man-monster, who was reputed to eat those he was imprisoned with. Luckily for the two delinquents, the man-monster turned out to be Pulger. They escaped via a gigantic tunnel Pulger had discovered under the cell, part of a warren burrowed by local animals, the Snufflegruffs, but were attacked by an equally gigantic Snufflegruff.

    Fleeing while Pulger stayed behind the fight the creature, DR and Quinch found an exit from the tunnel, but it turned out to lead into a cell in the Ghoyogian Penal Stockade which house Crazy Chryssie, who had escaped the mental institution her father had placed her in following her attack on the Bleating Heart play and become a mercenary for the Ghoyogi until a practical joke using frag-mines landed her in the stockade. Understandably and violently annoyed with DR, she attacked him, but the assault was interrupted by Pulger's arrival, with the Snufflegruff close behind.

    The animal destroyed the cell block, and DR, Quinch, Chryssie and Pulger escaped into the jungle, only to be caught between Sgt. Rorchmutt's patrol and the pursuing Ghoyogians. In utter desperation DR tried to convince both sides that he had experienced a divine vision, during which an unspecified god had told him they should all make friends and that anyone who messed with DR would have their brains exploded.

    Unsurprisingly, no one believed him, until a few seconds later when the skies lit up. However, it proved to be the spaceship of Quinch's skyscraper sized mother, coming in response to DR's letter to retrieve her son. She unwittingly squashed the soldiers of both sides when she emerged, and took DR and his friends away to safety.

    DR and Quinch Go to Hollywood

    Later, in the United Galaxies Omnibus Depot, DR and Quinch encountered Torquetto Jubbli, formerly a top Hollywood (a film making planet, not the coincidentally named place on the destroyed Earth) screenwriter until he fell victim to writer's block, which put him on skid row for a decade. Having finally overcome his block, he now intended to return to Hollywood with his new script, but, as he was explaining this to the two delinquents, he collapsed, seemingly dead. Deciding not to let opportunity pass by, DR and Quinch stole his tickets to Hollywood and his script.

    Playing on the Hollywooders' gossiping tendencies, DR fooled local film studio president Milton "C.B." Multiboon and top star Marlon into backing the making of Jubbli's script with DR as director, but DR discovered that Jubbli's handwriting was illegible, leaving him with no clue as to the script's contents. Luckily Marlon was also illiterate, and so unable to spot this problem, and was so unintelligible that no one could tell that he didn't know his lines. With Quinch acting as camera man, DR bluffed his way into production, ordering an insane array of bizarre objects for props to befuddle those observing the shoot into not realizing he didn't know what to shoot. Since the one word he had been able to make out from the script was oranges, DR ordered a mountain of 16000 to be deposited on set, with massive neon signs warning people not to approach the unstable citrus Everest.

    Unfortunately, Marlon couldn't read the signs, and took an orange from near the bottom, triggering an avalanche that crushed him to death beneath three hundred tons of fruit. Unperturbed, DR immediately proclaimed the film would be a tribute to the late actor, titled "Mind the Oranges, Marlon!" Though consisting only of random, badly filmed scenes, and disowned by an enraged CD, who vowed both DR and scriptwriter Jubbli were dead men if they ever showed their faces in Hollywood again, the film broke box-office records, becoming a cult classic among students who would rewatch it again and again while repeating the dialogue. Absconding with the box office takings, DR and Quinch returned to the Omnibus Depot a month after they had left to find Jubbli's body still in situ, but to their surprise, he awoke from what had actually been a deep coma to complete the sentence he had started four weeks earlier, and, blissfully unaware of the demolition job done to his reputation by DR, he set off for Hollywood with his script.

    DR and Quinch Get Back to Nature

    During their next summer vacation DR and Quinch set up Camp Apocalypse, taking payment for running a less than safe scouting camp for a group of unsuspecting kids. They trained the scouts to identify whether a plant was poisonous or not by throwing their fellows into its leaves, to forage for food by robbing local stores at gunpoint, to identify birds flying high up in the sky by shooting them down so they could be examined more closely, and other "useful" wilderness survival skills, forcing them to send happy letters home telling their parents they were having a wonderful time and honestly not being forced to sign said letters by being held upside down over tanks of carnivorous fish. The crime spree the pair started swiftly drew the attention of local authorites who laid seige to the camp, finally storming it on the day the parents of DR and Quinch's unfortunate students came to visit. DR and Quinch slipped away in the confusion, wearing shrubbery to disguise themselves as bushes and stealing one of the visiting parents' cars, which still had the keys in them and the engines running, per a request in the scouts' letters home.

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