Photo by Bill Smith

I’m high in the hills of Pasadena standing inside the Hunting
Lodge for Wayward Comic Artists, otherwise known as Tony Millionaire’s garage-studio.
We are four beers into a six-pack and Millionaire — raccoon carcass on head
— is fumbling with a stuffed fox. He tells me that he bought it from an Indian
who’d taxidermied the animal — a roadkill — with available materials. The fox’s
lips curl away from the whittled-wood insert that crudely forms his snout; pointy
sticks fill in for teeth. It looks like his wooden dentures are falling out.
This strikes me as doubly funny because Millionaire himself is fond of dropping
out his front teeth to make memorably grotesque faces, and one of the prints
hanging directly behind him is, I think, of George Washington. Near Washington
are several old portraits painted by Millionaire’s grandmother, who was not
a famous cartoonist but quite skilled nonetheless. The studio walls are the
artist’s ink-and-paper fixations come-to-life: sailing ships, 19th-century houses,
dead critters and, of course, sock monkeys.

L.A. WEEKLY: The last time we talked, you were working on an Uncle
Gabby toy with a removable brain. How did that turn out?
MILLIONAIRE: It looks real good. You can see all of the hairs on
his neck. But they made one mistake. I sent it back a couple of times. You see
the green thing on his hat, it’s supposed to be a clover, but it’s a bow. I
finally just said the hell with it.

It’s pretty obvious that it’s supposed to be a shamrock. But maybe to a sculptor
in Asia . . .
Yeah! He’s supposed to be a drunken Irish monkey.

I guess an artist halfway around the world might not know that he’s an Irish
monkey.
You should’ve seen what they did with the Sock Monkey figurines. They kept
sending these models of it. And on the hat, they couldn’t figure out the concept
of the pompom. They thought it was a flower. They did a rose. I said, “It’s
not a rose, it’s a pompom.” And they said, “What’s a pompom?” In Japanese, pan
pan [which is pronounced a lot like “pompom”] means a prostitute. I did
a little drawing of it, e-mailed that to them and then it was a carnation. They
sent back three different versions of flowers. Finally I went to the Salvation
Army, went through the toy bin till I found a toy that had a pompom on it, cut
it off and mailed it to them, saying, “This is a pompom.” Now it kind of looks
like a pompom.

You’ve had a busy year with two Sock Monkey books [That Darn Yarn
and Little and Large] as well as another Maakies collection. Now I see
a stack of finished drawings on your drafting table.
I’m working on a book, 100 pages — first time I’ve done a 100-page comic
book. It’s a story about a tiny little man who’s made by mice out of suet and
yeast and all kinds of garbage that the mice find in the basement. They make
him to fight against a cat that’s in the house. He turns into this ferocious
fighter. They put flies into his eye sockets to allow him to see and he runs
around like crazy tearing everything up. After [he has] a ferocious battle with
the cat, the little girl who lives in the house picks him up and she plucks
the flies out . . . and puts hazelnuts that she finds into his eyes. It’s basically
a love story about a little girl and a tiny wild man made out of suet.

How does the thought process go when you write a book, before you start inking?
First I walk around for two months trying to figure out what I’m gonna do
. . . For Billy Hazelnuts, I actually did some of the pages — the big-splash
pages — before I started writing the book. At some point I knew there
would be a big ship crashing through the clouds and somebody on the ground looking
up at it saying, “What’s that?!” Then I had to map out the thumbnail sketches
and then I kept honing it down. I’ll write some bits of dialogue that I think
are funny, but I don’t like to write the whole dialogue out. The actual word-by-word
dialogue is done as I go along, following the [visual] skeleton of the story.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The Sock Monkey story about
the little baby bird turned out to be the best story ever, and I thought from
the beginning that it would be the worst book I ever wrote.

Do you sell all of your art boards when you’re done with a book?
Everything must go, baby! That one on the wall, I did for my wife. That
was an illustration to the song “Moon River,” that’s the only one I won’t sell.
That and the first Maakies I ever did I won’t sell. I figure if somebody
likes [the originals] enough to pay 350 bucks for them, they’re gonna take care
of them better than I will. You’ve seen my garage — drawers full of drawings,
spider webs on some of them.

Do you ever think about your place in the history of comics?
Number one, top of the list. Open up the giant book of comics and cartoonists
and pull out the biggest name you can find and it’s gonna be Tony Millionaire.

I Googled your name and got 77,000 hits.
I recently got a million because I have a better computer than you. I’ll
tell you what a number of those hits are: When I had my cartoon running on Saturday
Night Live, I was all excited, I thought, “Oh great! This is it, my career
is skyrocketing!” I Googled myself on Google groups, and the Saturday Night
Live fans were on there. And they were like, “What is this crap?!” “This
is the worst!” “This is terrible!” They weren’t that good, really.

I was so drunk and happy. I was famous and rich — gonna be rich, anyway. I was
imagining the house I was going to buy on the Hudson River. I was gonna get
a nice Victorian house and paint it red. And these bastards were telling me
how terrible this cartoon was, so I jumped on there and said, “What the fuck?
How stupid can you possibly be that you can’t understand this cartoon? It’s
a cartoon for Christ’s sake.” And they were like, “Hey! A guy who was
on Saturday Night Live is now talking to us!” And they jumped all over
it. I said, “I see that you’re from Ohio, I get it, you’re from the middle of
the woods and you’re stupid.” And then I just got deluged. They kept coming
on, saying, “Oh, what an asshole he is!”

You’re working on another animated version of The Maakies for Cartoon
Network’s Adult Swim.
Probably be called Maakies’ Tavern. Dino Stamatopoulos — he was a
writer on Mr. Show and wrote TV Funhouse with Robert Smigel. He
and Jay Johnston are writing the script now. I’ll also be a writer on it, but
I’m probably gonna step back and let them go. I’ll toss in jokes and tell them,
“Don’t say, ‘Get a life,’ don’t say, ‘Hey, what’s happenin’?’” I’ve gotta make
sure they don’t put in modern culture references. I have no idea how it’s going
to work out, but I’m just really excited to see it happen.

Those guys are both big booze hounds, they love the world of old men in bars,
fighting. When the hipsters come in, [in crazy old-man voice:] “My god, these
hipsters are coming in ruining our bar!” At the same time the hipsters are bringing
all of these young women, and they’re, “But look at her. Look at her boobs .
. .” You throw Uncle Gabby and Drinky Crow into the mix and you’re all set.

Between you and Fantagraphics, who talked whom into doing a 100-page book?
Gary Groth called me and said, “Would you like to do a 100-page book about
Drinky Crow of the Maakies?” And I said, “Sure!” I had an old script
that I had written that was actually a treatment for a movie that somebody told
me they were gonna make years ago. And I sent it back to him, and he said, “That’s
the book, write it.” Then I thought, I don’t want to do that because the Maakies
stories are all bam-bam-bam, one joke after the other. If I start writing a
book about those guys I’m gonna be using old jokes. Or writing new jokes, that,
when I really need a good joke for my comic strip, I’m gonna steal. I’m
gonna be eating myself as I go along. So I said, “Fuck that, I’m gonna write
a totally new story.”

The Billy Hazelnuts story is okay for kids. There’s no swearing or nastiness
in it. And Gary Groth said, “We can’t sell a book for kids.” I said, “No no
no, this is not a kids’ book, it’s an adults’ book.” But I kinda think it’s
a kids' book. Ha, I tricked him. The Sock Monkey books are the same as
Billy Hazelnuts, really. They’re based on kids’ books. They’re for adults
who remember and love great old kids' books. All of the really beautiful books
were done in the 1920s and 1930s, like the Raggedy Ann books. Terrible
stories but beautifully illustrated. And Winnie the Pooh of course, the
greatest book ever made, before Disney fuckin’ ruined it.

[

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.

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