Tony Millionaire: Interview
By James Norton

Comics are art. Deal with it.

The "debate" over the artistic worth of comics as a medium is, arguably, a manufactured one: Most people who care to really look at the work of cartoonists like R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware can see a level of craft and creativity equal to that found in any other medium.

But "Maakies," the strip drawn by cartoonist Tony Millionaire, often reads like a visual interpretation of the battle (moot or not), spelled out in panel after well-rendered panel. At times, "Maakies" wallows in the gutter, as tigers consume and shit out anthropomorphic monkeys, crows vomit and bloody battle scenes stain the strip with vivid buccaneer-era carnage and gore.

At other times, however, Millionaire lets slip the fact that there's something more serious at work behind the cartoon. "Maakies" often speaks in poetic visions, rendered with subtlety and imagination. Millionaire's nautical illustrations are varied, dynamic and hypnotically detailed. The strip is soaked with ruminations on alcohol, the occasionally crushing emptiness of life and the hilarious pain of romantic relationships.

But if "Maakies" betrays a certain level of ambiguity, its creator is fairly forthright on the subject.

"A lot of cartoonists are desperate to be recognized as fine artists," Millionaire said, in a recent e-mail interview. "This never made any sense to me. Comics are comics and it doesn't make any difference what category they are placed under. If someone has something to say, well, they just say it."

Whatever the underlying emotion of "Maakies" may be, it's spoken through an artistic voice with a noble lineage — it's not hard to see how generations of cartoonists have shaped the way Millionaire conceives and illustrates his sometimes painstakingly crafted panels.

"I [feed] off classic illustration," Millionaire said. "I love Ernest Shepard ('Winnie the Pooh'), Johnny Gruelle who did the old Raggedy Ann books, all those old freaks from the twenties and thirties who did the newspaper strips. I can't understand how that got so lost."

Millionaire, who is 44 and a recent emigre from New York to Los Angeles, originally grew up in Gloucester, Mass. He said his almost militant sense of tradition and craft arrived as a hand-me-down, passed along at an early age.

"Well, my mommy told me when I asked her to buy me a coloring book, 'There will be no coloring books in this house. If you want to color something, draw it first.' That grumpy old bitch taught me well — she was an art teacher at a junior high."

Millionaire's maternal grandparents were both professional artists, and this rubbed off on the young lad.

"My grandparents did a lot of drawings and paintings of ships, so it just feels homey to me to do comics about sailors," Millionaire said. "... They did really beautiful watercolors and oils and my grandfather did a lot of pen and ink. I used to watch him sharpen his pencils with a razor blade, it looked cool. He was from Texas, and he was friends with Roy Crane, the cartoonist who did Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy."

With a bit of tutoring from his grandfather, Millionaire turned his gift for rendering into a way to earn a living.

"I started drawing houses for a living when I was in college at the Massachusetts College of Art, knocking on doors in high-falutin' neighborhoods," Millionaire said. "My grandfather taught me a lot about that, how to use a knife to scrape the blacks so they would soften up, but he always hated that I was using Rapidographs. He liked the quills and bottles of ink that I always found so messy. I use a fountain pen now, sort of in between."

And at the heart, this sort of genetically infused craft is the bone-breaking motor that powers the essence of "Maakies," making it a riotous comedy of desperate slapstick spread across the page in illustrations that can fully transport a reader to a vivid, colorful, horrible, horrible, horrible quasi-historic past.

The setting of "Maakies" — a world of pirate ships and seaports — is one that's usually reserved for children's literature. But the realities of the strip are barbarism, venereal disease, pillage and bloody plunder — they'd be depressing if they weren't so damn funny.

"Let me say something about pirates and buccaneers," Millionaire said. "You will never see any romanticized pirates in any Maakies strip, because of the simple fact that I despise pirates. Pirates were and are murderous raping robbers, and if you read enough history, you will realize that history isn't just some story, it's something that really happened.

"Can you imagine what it must have been like to be a 15-year-old kid, on your first voyage, trying your best not to get the ship sunk, and then you look on the horizon and there are some pirates. They don't take you to some buried treasure or give you some rum, they don't have a patch on their eye, no parrot, no peg-leg, they just climb on board your ship, beat the shit out of the crew, rape any women they find on board and then they kill you," Millionaire said. "Does this mean that two hundred years from now carjackers will be romanticized and Disneyland will have a 'Carjackers of Urban America' ride?"

To some extent, it's the brutality of his pirate world that allows Millionaire to give "Maakies" the intensity that makes it as powerful, and as powerfully funny, as it often is. And like most — well, art — "Maakies" is cathartic for the artist, as well as the reader.

"'Maakies' is me spilling my guts," Millionaire said. "Writing and drawing about all the things that make me want to jump in the river, laughing at the horror of being alive. People send me letters saying that Maakies helps them cope with the embarrassment and the disgust of everything. It's depressing being a living human, and laughing about it is the only thing you can do after awhile."

At the same time he produces "Maakies," Millionaire also draws a more long-form, somewhat more gentle, comic book called "Sock Monkey."

"'Sock Monkey' is me trying to rise above all that bullshit, to be more poetic, looking at the bright side, remembering the things that used to delight me as a child. Of course the main theme to all the 'Sock Monkey' books is the crashing of innocent fantasy into bone-crushing reality, so I guess I can't escape my crabby grampa persona no matter what I attempt."

Watching Millionaire's tightrope walk unfold throughout the pages of his recent "Maakies" collection, it's hard not to ask: Will the kinder, more delicately thoughtful aspect of "Maakies" ever eclipse the strip's more down and dirty side?

"I really try to be more gentle, poetic, etc.," Millionaire said, "but after about a half hour of it I just want to BLOW MY FUCKING BRAINS OUT!!!"

Spoken like a true artist.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Tony Millionaire