As some others have said before, I can't believe I finally find the original artist of the Hugzzz picture. This is a testimony coming from Chile, around the year you posted that, over here I was a teenager whose generation was having their first line of phones that were able to store pictures. Everyone had that picture, and I do mean EVERYONE, cause whoever didn't have it, passed it on to the others between classes through their, at the time, brand new gimicky infrared technology.
There were a lot of uncredited edits of it going around too, with different characters and ethnicities. I saw that you were aware of that and didn't approve of it... And I'm super sorry for that.
You probably will never reply to this, maybe you won't read it, but hey, I just wanted to say thank you. You made a whole generation of chilean kids happy with your picture.