Tony Millionaire

I'm sorry.  Anyone who has their artwork tattooed on some floozy needs no introduction.

Welcome to the world of Tony Millionaire.



Chief Magazine: What’s your real name?

Tony Millionaire: Tony Millionaire.

Fantastic.

It’s French!

That’s true! When you were a kid, was there any single thing that you would hunt down, or it was just reading everything you could get your hands on?

I grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I used to run around in the woods and build tree houses and catch frogs and stuff, but as far as reading, it was always about newspaper comics.

It was pretty much everything I could grab. I, of course, knew that Peanuts was the top of the line, but every time we went to visit an uncle or something, I’d be down in the cellar going through the recycled newspapers in stacks and just reading week after week of dailies and Sundays.

It’s nice when they’re just all there like that, collected almost graphic novel-style.

It was great because I was in another town, so they had strips that we didn’t have, like Hi and Lois and Blondie. Because all we had was Miss Tweety and Peanuts and a few others.

I know the old style of Peanuts was cool with the big, weird, creepy heads. Was that still the style when you were checking it out, or did they already modernize it?

I remember when Snoopy started coming around; that’s when I started getting really into it. It must have been ’65 or so, when Snoopy started becoming a character that stood up and walked. I remember when Schulz said that once he got Snoopy up on his two feet, then he would never put him back down on all fours.

He just kind of evolved right then.

A lot of people say that’s when Peanuts started to decline, but I don’t agree because it was started out to be a little more intellectual than it got, but then they realized kids were reading, and they started doing it a little more so the kids could understand it.

And you prefer it for the kids?

You know what? I like all of it: I liked the beginning, and I liked the end. I wasn’t, of course, too crazy about it in the ‘80s because I remember its heyday when I really loved it. Then I moved onto underground comics, so I moved up away from Peanuts, but jeez, what a great thing to start your reading on.

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I guess the version of that that hooked my generation on comic strips was Calvin and Hobbes.

Right. You must be younger.

I’m a little younger.

I loved Calvin and Hobbes, too. When it came out, I thought, “Oh, great – the newspaper comics are back again.” Now I’m not too crazy about anything out there.

Nothing’s really doing it for you?

You know what I have to tell you I like – One Big Happy. It’s a comic strip about a family. And it’s well-written. It’s sort of written from the viewpoint of kids; it’s pretty good.

Do you ever read the old, old Popeye?

I do – that’s what I really love to read. That new collection by Fantagraphics is great, and supposedly the next one that’s coming out is when he really got into it better, with Sea Hag, more Popeye – more than Thimble Theater.

And those books are huge.

They’re big. I’ve got that big Windsor McKay book, too – Amazing Sundays, whatever that’s called. I just love that stuff. My grandfather used to have collections of comics around. He would clip them out of the papers because he loved them, so he had bunches of them, and I used to just flip through them when I’d go to his house on Sunday afternoon, laying on the floor with huge pages opening up. Of just opening up page after page and things getting more and more surreal.

I read somewhere that your whole family is artistically inclined.

My mom was an art teacher; she taught art at junior high school-level. My dad was a designer – designed for trade shows. My grandfather was an illustrator. My grandmother was a portrait painter; she did watercolor portraits – very, very good. They had a little gallery down in Rockport, Massachusetts, and they used to paint portraits out of there. I still have a couple of them – they were amazing. It’s very difficult to do portraits in watercolor, but she really liked it. Because with a face, you’re trying to get a likeness, so you’re bound to do it all wrong. And you can’t really start over or correct your mistakes with watercolor.

You can’t really layer that stuff.

No. Once it’s down, it’s there. You can scrub it a little bit with a sponge, but that’s about all. And my grandfather did a lot of pen-and-ink work, and he did a lot of illustrations for boys’ magazines, adventure books, cowboys shooting a buffalo. That stuff was great.

From an early place, were they really supportive of you pursuing art as a living?

Oh, yeah. When I was in college, I remember drawing people’s houses for a living, and I remember sitting there in front of some guy’s house – his mother had hired me – and this guy comes out. He’s about 20 years old, and he looks at me sitting there drawing a house, and he goes, “What does your dad feel about you drawing houses?” I said, “Wow, I don’t know. I’m sure he probably rather I worked in an advertising firm or something. What do you mean?” He goes, “No, but I mean, it just seems to be kind of a, you know...” I said, “A WHAT?” “Well kind of like the thing a girl would do more.” I said, “What are you talking about?” Then I stood up, I started confronting him, and then I realized that drawing a house is kind of a pussified thing to do. At least according to him.

Wow, that’s so random. What a weird way for him to interpret that.

I told my mother about it. She said, “Your dad used to get a lot of that.” Especially earlier, in the ‘50s and ‘40s, it was not considered a manly thing to do – to draw. [Laughs.] But it was shocking to me because my whole family has always been good artists. You try to tell Picasso that he’s a pussy, he’ll punch you in the nose.

Violent people can make art.

Sure!

[Laughs.] That’s great.

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How did you get started doing the house drawings?

My father’s new wife got me a job. She’s like, “You’re not paying your rent; we’re paying the rent over there at that house,” because I was staying at my sister’s house. My dad was paying for it because she was in college. She got me a job washing dishes in a restaurant. I got angry at the chef because he started bossing me around. So I took the apron off and threw it at him – I said, “You wash the dishes” – and I left.

Then I thought, “Well, now I better do something,” because I’ll have to face the wrath of my father’s wife. So I went to the library. I got a picture of a Victorian house, I did a big drawing of it on a piece of bristle board, and then I just took it out to Eastern Point, which is where the big houses were in Gloucester, out on the ocean. And I just started knocking on doors, and the third house I knocked on, I said, “Would you like a drawing of your house?” And they were like, “Yeah!” because they were these people that were on vacation. They were actually just visiting their dad’s house, so they thought, “Yeah, that would be a good gift for him.” Because in those days, I was only charging $25, and that was a good day’s pay for an 18-year-old.

So you just came up with this yourself?

Yeah, so I just started drawing, and then I just started walking and knocking on doors. After a while I started putting cards in mailboxes instead, and then I did that for, I don’t know… 20 years.

Jesus. I read somewhere that you were doing that in Berlin?

Yeah, I did. In Berlin, I had to get someone to translate the cards for me. I dropped them in mailboxes and people would call up, and the first thing I would say was, “Do you speak English?” because I couldn’t speak any German. But it almost always worked out. I’d get a translator, and then I’d go draw their house.

So internationally, no problems.

It was a really good job because I could really do it anytime I wanted, and I kind of liked it. Plus, I love old houses, and I loved walking around through those old neighborhoods all the time. The only time it was a real drag was when winter came.

I can imagine that would not be the time to stay outside and draw.

Right, and there’s no leaves on the trees, and the gardens don’t look right. People don’t hire you that often, but I still managed to scrape by. And the thing is, I could also go out and get an illustration job.

More of a seasonal gig.

It was okay. It was something that I could always make work if I had to, and otherwise I’d get a job tearing down walls or something.

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What are the earliest incarnations of the Maakies characters, and where did that all originate?

That all originated when it was a really, really bitter winter in, I think, 1992 or 3 in New York, and the streets were all frozen up with ice, and there was no way I was getting any work drawing houses. And there was no way I could get work doing anything else because it was just so bitterly cold and snowy. It was weird – it would snow and then melt a little bit and then just turn to ice, and it was just thick. It was very depressing, and my girlfriend just said, “Look, why don’t you get out of here because you can’t pay the rent.” “Fine,” so I stayed at somebody’s house, just slept on the sofa.

I used to go to this bar called Six-Twelve, and one night I did a little drawing of a crow blowing his brains out – and the owner, he said, “Listen, every time you draw that crow – do a little comic strip of him – I’ll give you a beer.” I was like, “Great! That’s my beer source.” So I started drawing Drinky Crow on napkins. And then he gave me some paper, and I started doing a regular strip for him, and he would photocopy them and put them in this little magazine called Hijinks – it was a photocopied magazine for the bar.

It turned out to be a good time because other people in the bar would be drawing them. And then somebody saw those strips and asked if I wanted to do a strip for The New York Press. That’s when I realized it was going to work out okay because as soon as I had that strip in The New York Press, I started getting illustration jobs. Then I started getting calls from The New Yorker and Screw magazine, and I was starting to work real magazine work. And after that, it all got better.

What did you draw for Screw magazine?

Screw magazine was great. A lot of cartoonists started out there – Robert Crumb started out there and Spain and a bunch of those underground guys in the ‘60s. And they’re still doing it now, I think – if they’re still around.

Yeah, Screw is still around. Goldstein isn’t so involved, but they’re still around.

They were great because they would say, “Two-page comics, you get a hundred bucks a page, and fifty bucks for the cover.” So you’d work your ass off and do three pages, and get your three hundred bucks, and fifty for the cover, so $350 for someone who was as down-and-out as I was at that time, that was a good week’s work.

That was a solid chunk of change.

That was good because all the jokes that you couldn’t use anywhere else, you could just save them for your Screw magazine folder. So any strips that I thought were too obscene for Maakies, I’d just say, “Yeah, I’ll just use them for Screw.”

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Were they the same characters, or it would just be random other stuff?

No, I’d have to change characters. There were a couple of strips called Fucky and Mr. Jinx, and they were based on the Captain’s Daughter in Maakies, Uncle Gabby. But I had to change the look of them a little bit so that it wouldn’t…

Directly infringe you own copyrights.

I wanted to keep them separate.

How long did you end up doing that for Screw?

I did it off-and-on with those guys for four or five years.

So that’s a solid pile of work.

I met a lot of people through them, like Danny Hellman and Kevin Hein and a lot of the New York cartoonists. They’d go to parties over there; Screw magazine was an anchor to a lot of the New York cartoonists. I wonder what they’re doing now over there – I don’t know.

I’m not really sure. I just know Al’s hitting really hard times. What was the next step from there?

The New York Press asked me to do a full page for the paper, and I said, “I want to do it old-fashioned, so I’ll do like the old Sunday comics.” So I did one called Sock Monkey, and it was about the sock monkey that just started crawling around in my old brownstone apartment, with the old windows and ceilings and stuff. And somebody at Dark Horse really loved it, and his name was Phillip Marr – Phillip Marr was the editor over there at the time – and he showed it to Mike Richardson, who’s the publisher, and they both decided to do a comic book, and then I started doing the Sock Monkey comic books. And from there my career took off. Now I’m going on to movin’ pictures, and I’ve got a TV show on Adult Swim, and going on and on.

It’s blowing up. The mature elements of Maakies – was it ever a speed bump or a stumbling block as far as people accepting Sock Monkey?

Not really. I find there’s a weirdly strong separation. A lot of people who know about Sock Monkey don’t know about Maakies, and most people, I guess, that know about Maakies know something about the Sock Monkey. Maakies is in the newspaper, and Sock Monkey is in the comic book stores. So only now that Maakies is being collected are people starting to make the connection.

Really? So it’s been kept separate in the social consciousness this whole time.

Yeah, that’s why I’ve been able to use even the same names – well, I used Uncle Gabby’s name – in both books, and people don’t make the connection. Then I also did some work for They Might Be Giants; I did some T-shirts and an album cover for them. And it’s weird – every now and then, somebody will be like, “I know you. You’re the guy that did the t-shirts.” You know what I mean?

Yeah, it’s strange all the different ways people can know your work.

When I do the Sock Monkey stuff, I want to keep it sort of clean so the kids can read it, even though it’s not really aimed at kids, but they can read it. So I just keep the sex and violence out of it. I mean, the crow gets drunk every now and then, but not that often.

[Laughs.] Well, I guess there’s plenty of room in the Maakies universe for all of the worst of the worst to happen. It seems like those two worlds are colliding somewhat in Billy Hazelnuts, can you tell me about that?

Yeah, Fantagraphics asked me to do a Drinky Crow graphic novel; they wanted to have a book. And I thought, “I don’t really want to do that because I’m going to start stealing from myself.” Because every week I’m going nuts trying to think of an idea for my comic strip, and if I write a book, I’m going to start stealing from the book. I really like keeping them in that world in their comic strip form, so I decided I should just come up with a completely different story, and I wanted to have a long, long story that starts from a beginning and goes to its end. I just finished book one, now I’m working on book two.

How many do you envision?

I think I’ll probably do three. I’m not sure if I’ll do more after that – we’ll see. But basically, the first story is about how he gets formed and how he becomes who he is. The second one is kind of about… well, you see what the second one is when you see it.

No handouts, buy the book if you want the story. Is there any overlying theme to the three books?

Well, it’s about the three stages of life, basically.

The first one is amazing, I’m just so happy it isn’t a one shot. But here’s a question, if you’re trying to keep the Maakies universe contained in the paneled world, how is it going to be presented as the show? What’s the layout of the show?

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Writing for a TV show, I teamed up with this writer Eric Caplan, who was the writer for Futurama, and he’s working on the Futurama movies right now. He’s been a writer for a long time, so he knows how to write for TV, and when we started writing The Drinky Crow Show, I started doing some dialogue, and he said to me, “You can’t put dialogue like that into a TV show. It’s going to sound fake; it’s going to sound like they’re mocking somebody. If you put long sentences and highfalutin language in there, it’s not going to work.”

Like a Kevin Smith film.

Yeah, right. [Laughs.] So he started writing it, and it was done in very simple language – much simpler than I would have done it in – and I really thought, “Well, he knows what he’s doing.” And then I heard the actors doing it and I realized, that’s what it is – it’s that you’ve got to give the actors room to act. So it’s a whole different way of writing.

I guess they fill in those blanks.

They do the pauses, and they do the inflections and all the stuff that you don’t have to explain because they’re acting it.

Do you still maintain that kind of whaling language?

It’s still old-fashioned and absurd and violent and as funny as shit, but it’s just a different structure. You don’t have to explain a lot of stuff; you can just show it because it’s a cartoon. I guess the good thing is that the people at Adult Swim, when we sent in the first draft, they said, “Wait a minute – this isn’t close enough to the script.” We said, “This is TV; we thought we had to clean it up a little bit.” They said, “No, clean it down.” It’s going to be much more violent, more suicidal, more disgusting.

That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

So there’s a lot of crazy stuff. We go down into the bugs’ world, too, as a sub-story.

To the near bacterial level?

There’s some bugs – every time somebody gets an arm chopped off, they want to go down there and get a hold of some of the goo and blood and eat it. So there’s a whole drama that happens under there.

That’s awesome. Is it going to be an 11-minute show?

It is. We finished the pilot so far; they’re going to be airing it sometime in the spring. Then we’ll see how many episodes they order from that.
We’ve got the voices of Billy West and
Tom Kenny and Dave Herman.

I know Billy West (Fry and Zoidberg from Futurama) but who is Dave Herman?

He’s hilarious; he plays the voice of Uncle Gabby. He was on MADtv, and he’s done a bunch of voiceover for King of the Hill and The Simpsons and Futurama. (Ed. note: He was also brilliantly portrayed the character Michael Bolton on Office Space)

And he just did this voice – he says, “I know how to do Uncle Gabby,” and he just started doing it – and I just cracked up. I said, “That’s perfect. That’s the voice for him.” Drinky Crow was really hard to get because we tried so many times to get it right, but Billy West nailed it with this tired, soft old-man voice. It worked really well.

Then we get Tom Kenny – SpongeBob Tom. He’s doing all the villains.

He’s so perfect for that.

He’s pretty evil.

Tom’s got a great voice for that stuff. It’s got all that Mr. Show energy. It’s terrifying.

Becky Thyre does all the women’s voices.

If I remember right, she's your wife?

Mm-hm. She was on Mr. Show and PCU.

How many female characters are in the show?

At this point, there’s three for the pilot. Actually, there’s four – but the mermaid doesn’t say anything. Also, Billy West did the female voice of the whale when she’s trying to lure the other whale to come give her a hump.

[Laughs.] Great.  I was wondering if it was going to be the way it was presented on SNL’s TV Funhouse, is it similar at all?

No, the whole thing was completely different than the Saturday Night Live cartoon.

Can you explain the animation a little bit, the way that it’s going to be presented.

The people at Adult Swim – and I agree with them – they said, “Look, we don’t want to see any CGI.” Because the plastic-looking, slow-moving CGI stuff, it just bothers you. I don’t like it either, well not too much – depends on who does it. But the company that we’re working with does CGI, so we decided to invent a new form of CGI called Maakk-umation. Maakk-umation is where you take CGI models, and then you wrap my drawings on top of them so that it looks like three-dimensional versions of my original drawings. So it doesn’t have that plastic CGI look, but they’re moving around in three dimensions.

It’s got that great detail.

It has the detail of a Sunday comic strip. It has the pop colors and the flat, papery colors of a Sunday newspaper comic.

It’s just so fantastic that they’re not going to censor you guys.

I was very surprised about that. We were like, “Can we really have him being raped by a whale?” They said, “Yeah, sure. Don’t show the penis.” [Laughs.]

So they drew the line somewhere…

You can’t really show the penetration, but... [Laughs.]

And They Might Be Giants do the theme?

They did. They did the theme song. Also, a band called Brass Castle did all the rest of the music – all the scoring. Have you heard of Brass Castle?

No, where are they from?

They are these two crazy guys that live in Atlanta, Georgia. They’re total nihilists. They just drink and get onstage and go crazy, and they’re very funny and loud, good-sounding.

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Cool. What kind of music is it?

Let’s see… crash-crash-crash-crash, bee-wee-wee-wee – like that.

Good. [Laughs.]

Jangle-jangle-jangle- crash-crash-crash – like that.

It’s catchy.

It’s catchy all right. [Laughs.] I can’t wait to see them live. I’ve never actually met them personally, but I want to.

Do they tour a lot, or are they basically a local Atlanta thing?

I don’t know. I’m not too sure about that.

I’ll look into it. Now we’ve got the last question: was there anytime you’ve thought in your life, “Oh my God, this is it. This is the end.”

There is one time… When I was about maybe nine years old, I was walking around in the woods. My dad was shooting clay pigeons at the gun club – it was like the fish and game club – and I was walking around in the woods, and I came to this little pond. The pond had been made by guys in order to lure ducks; it was a little manmade pond in the middle of the woods. here was a little green boat there. So I got in it, and I thought, “This is great – a boat. I’ll take this stick and I’ll push myself around, but it turned out the stick was too short and the water was too deep. So I jumped out of the boat, hoping to walk back to the shore, but I didn’t realize that the water was about six, seven feet deep, so I sunk right to the bottom. I remember standing there, wearing a big, heavy winter coat and big boots and looking up. And I could see the sunshine glittering through the water, and I thought, “This is it. Now I’m drowning. I’m going to die.” And I just started flailing my arms around – I couldn’t swim – and I grabbed a hold of these roots that were just sticking out of the bank, and I pulled myself from them and got up to the top, so I wasn’t dead after all. Then I ran back home and told my mother about it, and I got spanked for almost drowning because, of course, it was my fault.

Of course.

Because they were busy drinking beer. And then next summer, we all got swimming lessons.

See, there you go. One last thing that I read and I wanted to check with you, and I kept thinking that this was going to be the story that you were going to tell, but I heard that you got into a car accident that knocked out your teeth when you were 13?

That would have been the accident where I almost died, right?

Sounds like it.

I didn’t die in that accident, but a friend of mine did.

Oh, God.

We were driving down the road in a yellow Camaro. I was 13, and the driver was 16. He just got his license, and we were driving in the road; this is in the days before anybody wore seatbelts, so nobody had seatbelts on. So we were going about 50 miles an hour, I remember. I remember thinking, “He’s going too fast. He’s going 50 down this little country road.” And “Yellow Submarine” was playing on the radio, and the driver rolled down his window and spit out this window, and the spit stuck on the top of the glass, and it rolled down. And he laughed, and he said, “Teh-heh, look at that,” and his brother, who was in the passenger seat, said, “Gary, you’re so stupid.” So that’s when we started hitting the cement posts, just like, boom-boom-boom, one after another. And I looked up, and I thought, “Turn the wheel; turn the wheel,” and then the last thing I saw was a tree.

No!

And then when I woke up, I was in the backseat of a car, and I was like, “What’s going on?” I was looking out the window, and the trees – every time I would go pass a tree, it would flash blue. And I realized that it was the lights from the police car that we were in. And I turned my head, and I saw my brother; his skull was sticking out. His head was cut from the top to the bottom, so I could see his skull.

Oh, shit.

Yeah. [Laughs.] And my mouth – I couldn’t move it very well. I later found that it looked like somebody had thrown a cherry bomb in there. All the teeth were sticking straight out; I don’t know how that happened. The guy in the passenger seat dies – the one who said, “Gary, you’re so stupid” – and everybody else just got very mangled. So they sewed us all up, and we went to the funeral, and that was that story. Ever since then, we wore seatbelts.

Websites

www.maakies.com
www.tonymillionaire.com

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