Tony Millionaire: And Then There Was Maakies

No doubt inspired by Millionaire's down and out Brooklyn winter of '93.

The thing is, if a strip is about violence and getting drunk, it has to be funny. If it's funny then it works.

Tony Millionaire , U.S.A.

Date Posted: 05/24/07

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Tony Millionaire is the creator of Maakies, a syndicated comic strip that appears in numerous high profile papers across North America, including The Stranger and LA Weekly, as well as in Italian and Norwegian magazines. The comic spawned a Saturday Night Live cartoon and a new Cartoon Network series, The Drinky Crow Show. Despite the subversive behavior of his characters and the literal toilet humor you'd expect from a teenager, Millionaire is well into adulthood, now that he's been drawing the misadventures of Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby for nearly 14 years. With the help and inspiration of his two young children, he's branched out with the slightly more politically correct Sock Monkey books, which he often gets his girls to help him draw. This is as far as his children are allowed into his world, because Maakies is Adults Only. Some of the pictures in this story contain swear words, so brace yourself or ask the kids to shut their eyes...

I grew up in Massachusetts and my interest in comic strips began back when my family would visit my grandparents, who lived a half-hour away in Rockport. They were artists and painted portraits and nautical scenes of where they lived. I totally fell in love with seascape and ocean vistas, which is why you see so much of it in my strips. Space is another background I use in my strips because my dad was very much into planets and astronomy and used to design exhibits for science shows. We had a telescope and would look for planets from our backyard. I was attracted to the idea of all these other worlds you can go to, and going to them on a sailing ship is the best thing I can think of.

My grandfather also loved old comics and was friends with a lot of old cartoonists, so he had big book collections of Sunday comics. I'd pour over those long-gone comics, which you couldn't find anywhere in those days, although now a few comic companies are reproducing some. I was lucky because I fell in love with those comics as a kid, which is why mine have an old-fashioned look as well.

When I went to college, I wanted to go into illustration because I somehow thought I could learn more about comics and pen and ink drawings that way. The problem was that I'm kind of sloppy with getting my act together. To get into the illustration department, you really had to have a good looking portfolio that was well-organized. You had to look like you had your business together.