MAAKIES

Millionaire soon will be if there's any justice. Of course, there's no justice.

By Mike Whybark     July 09, 2002

Tony Millionaire achieved comics-industry recognition first in 1999 with the release of his standard-sized black-and-white book for Dark Horse, TONY MILLIONAIRE'S SOCK MONKEY, and followed up with a children's book using the mise-en-scene of the comic book. But pasty-faced denizens of St. Mark's Comics may be surprised to learn that before the books, there was Millionaire's weekly alternative-circuit comic strip, MAAKIES. The same characters as the leads in SOCK MONKEY form the core of the strip: a bibulous, dewy-eyed corvid, Drinky Crow, and an equally reprobate behatted simian, Uncle Gabby, lead short, suicidal lives on the bounding main, searching for booze and fighting with imperial crocodiles. Narrative is not the priority in the development of the strip - the non sequitur and disjointed panel are key elements in Millionaire's technique.

At the base of each strip, a small, and I do mean small, four-panel strip is drawn, similar in tone and feel to the incidental marginals that sometimes decorated interstitial spaces in Herriman's KRAZY KAT. These strips generally feature a four-line gag delivered by a stock set of bit (or is that "bitty") players who are as alcohol focused as Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby.

The final elements of the strip are Millionaire's obsessive fascination with naval heritage and technology, apparent in his detailed, fantastic depictions of diverse quantities of historic vessels from many periods of seafaring history. This fascination with the past is reflected in his pursuit of the craft of earlier generations of newspaper comics draftsmen. His truly magnificent drawings, I'm sure he'd be surprised to hear, are in many ways the equal of his models, such as Charles Gibson and later innovators such as Herriman.

However, Millionaire's vision of the world is one which he would most emphatically not have been encouraged to pursue if he had landed a job under Hearst in 1900. In the world of Drinky Crow and the marginal bit players, suicide is a running sight gag, "Being drunk is the best feeling in my poor world," and death is truly a welcome release from all that is "bogus," which is to say, everything. I suspect that this jaundiced worldview is unconventional, but it makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. Others look at me strangely, but Millionaire is a comic genius.

Over the years the compilation covers, however, the subject matter changes, possibly in response to Millionaire's own experience with alcohol. Around 1999, a strip appears in which reference to not drinking for several months appears, and at about that time, suicides and the ruthless pursuit of drunken oblivion diminish in the strip.

Reading the book all at once is a dense, harrowing experience - for years, Millionaire poured the pure, f***ed-up invective of the sour alcoholic hipster into the strip. So concentrated is this essence of self-loathing that even I, a connoisseur and gourmand of this particular flavor of creativity, had to put the book aside.

Nonetheless, it's clear that Millionaire, in these strips, crafted the best comic strip since Bill Watterson of CALVIN & HOBBES laid down his pen. There's nary a chance in Hell that we'll see it as a daily, but I'm damn glad to have this collection. Now if Mr. Millionaire would only get off his butt long enough to restock L and XL Maakies Drinky Crow shirts on his website ;).