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The Layer Method
Our top Secret time-saving technique for creating and merging balloons and tails in Illustrator.
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Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Booze and Violence
Tony Millionaire's Premillennial Maakies
Premillennial Maakies: The First Five Years
Words and pictures by Tony Millionaire
Published by Fantagraphics Books
256 page B&W art for $24.95
Tony Millionaire might be a cartooning genius. Of course, he might also just be a sad drunk with superb art skills. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle - a talented cartoonist hell-bent on entertaining readers. Over the past few years, you could open up almost any smart weekly newspaper like the Chicago Reader, Baltimore City Paper, LA Weekly, or Village Voice and find the Maakies comic strip. Millionaire’s Maakies represents what’s right in a good comic strip and illustrates what’s missing in the strips cluttering the daily funny pages.
Maakies is funny; laugh out loud, embarrass yourself in public funny. Some of the strips fall flat, but every sixth or seventh strip hits it over the wall. Sometimes several strips in a row are almost perfect, causing you to pause, close the book, and just enjoy the feeling you get when good cartooning overwhelms your senses.
Maakies is relevant. A monkey and a crow drink a lot; occasionally they blow their brains out with a revolver. How is this less relevant than the bizarre headlines that permeate our lives in the last several years? It’s a comic strip and no one actually gets hurt.
Which brings me to my third point about Maakies. Millionaire takes chances. He doesn’t care if he pisses people off. In fact, that’s probably a bonus, because at least he knows readers are alive and responding to the art. As a vegetarian, animal rights, tree hugging, liberal, do-gooder, I should be offended approximately 17 times in this collection. But I’m not. When I was 19 years old a best friend put a pistol to his head outside of his girlfriend’s house. She didn’t come out when he honked the car horn, so he shot himself. Should I be offended 83 times in this book when Millionaire shows a character blowing his brains out? No, life’s too short, and it’s a comic strip. It’s fiction. An alcoholic monkey and crow struggle and do mean, sometimes hilarious things, to each other and those around them.
I suppose Maakies is also misogynistic. I don’t know, the strips in this book paint men, women, and animals with a pretty bleak brush. Men are pigs. They smell really bad sometimes. Women are needy. They complain about drinking. Animals are animals. There is no telling what they might do…
Which gets us to the beauty of Maakies. This beauty lies in the absurdity of a place in time where poodles dress as French soldiers and ear mites have deep conversations in the ears of a monkey. One strip may feature a world 20 million years ago and a “drinky cro-magnon, having discovered a fermented bunch of grapes,” while the very next strip features a celestial steam ship flirting with the seventh ring of Saturn.
There are no rules in Maakies, save that horrific violence and drunkenness must be punctuated by brief shots of the sublime.
Beyond the unpredictable brilliance of Maakies lies some damn good cartooning. Tony Millionaire knows his way around brush and ink. It’s more evident in his Sock Monkey comics, but even in the Maakies strips, you’ll find some stellar art. The meticulous ocean faring strips are especially well rendered. Some of the Chrysler Building meets the moon strips have the feeling of an anthropomorphic Kim Dietch strip. Millionaire is firmly in charge of his art, except for the few strips where he lets others take over.
Maakies strips are actually two strips in one. The main strip is the largest strip, the feature strip if you will. Underneath a tiny, less detailed, comic serves as a chaser. This strip is usually meaner and simpler.
Example:
Man: “I’m going to blow my brains out! Won’t that be romantic?”
Woman: “What’s so romantic about that?”
Man: “I’m going to use a flintlock!”
There are rumors of an Adult Swim cartoon featuring Drinky Crow. If there is a god, that would go a long way towards that whole GW Bush misstep. Premillenial Maakies, collecting the first five years of Millionaire’s strip, reminds you of how good comics strips can be when they are done right. There’s a bit of the absurd genius of Herriman’s Krazy Kat mixed with the adventure of E.C. Segar’s Popeye and Roy Crane’s seafaring Wash Tubbs.
Fantagraphics has published singular collections like Maakies, When We Were Very Maakies, the House at Maakies Corner, and Struwwelmaakies, but you can get more Millionaire from the excellent Sock Monkey books from Dark Horse Comics. Go to Maakies.com for even more fun, including original Maakies art. If you ever wonder what to get me for Christmas, just pick any Maakies strip with booze as the subject and you’ll have a friend forever.
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