Give Me a Tall Ship and a Monkey to Steer Her By

You ever see Karen Finley’s Winnie the Pooh book [Pooh Unplugged: A Parody] ?
No, I’ve never seen that.

I think Pooh sodomizes Eeyore.
I did do a strip one time about Disney Pooh going into the Hundred Acre Wood, finding the real Pooh. There was a big fight. Piglet shot him in the head. Pooh’s jumping up and down on him.

I love those books so much — the real books. And I heard that when the illustrator of the books, Ernest Shepard, saw the first Disney animation of Pooh, he called it “a complete travesty.”

On your desk, there are pictures of Billy Hazelnuts having his head sawed off. It reminds me of the old stuff. Old fairy tales were very violent. People shoving people into ovens and cutting parts off . . .
The newest Maakies book is called Der Struwwelmaakies, and that’s from Struwwelpeter, the classic German children’s book from the 1800s [1844, by Heinrich Hoffmann]. In America it was called Shockheaded Peter.It’s about a little kid who won’t cut his hair or his fingernails. In the end they finally cut his fingernails and his hair, but they cut his fingers off because he was a bad boy. I don’t remember the end of the whole story, but it was something really nasty like his fingers get cut off.

I’m actually working on a children’s book, with Hyperion. It’s based on the Sock Monkey books. But I’m not sure that I can even use my real name. I can’t use “Tony Millionaire” because this is a real kids’-book deal. If somebody buys this book then Googles me and finds stories about how a grandfather fucked his granddaughter in a comic strip, that’s not good. [Laughs.] So I may have to use one of my other beautiful names, which I’m not going to mention here.

The children’s-book market is a wall. You’ve got to crash through, and the only way is to get a deal with a real children’s-book publisher. Then you can slip under there and start giving these kids some subversive stuff.

Some philosopher — I don’t remember who — his theory was: You’ve got to give kids really beautiful children’s books in order to turn them into revolutionaries. Because if they see these beautiful things when they’re young, when they grow up, they’ll see the real world and say, “Why is the world so ugly?! I remember when the world was beautiful.” And then they’ll fight, and they’ll have a revolution. They’ll fight against all of our corruption in the world, they’ll fight to try to make the world more beautiful. That’s the job of a good children’s-book illustrator.

Info about the artist and his work can be found at maakies.com, fantagraphics.com and darkhorse.com.

A new show of Tony Millionaire's black and white drawings opens December 2 at Secret Headquarters, 3817 W. Sunset Blvd., at 8pm, and continues through December 31. (323)666-2228,www.thesecretheadquarters.com.