In certain New York artistic circles the cartoonist Tony Millionaire is famous for once, at the end of a very long night, having sex with a slice of pizza. This was in the mid-1990s, a period when Millionaire, who is large and striking-looking to begin with, used to favor lime-green leisure suits or a tuxedo with a bottle of vodka in the pocket. He would frequently end an evening by climbing on a table, removing his false teeth and declaring, "I am Tony Millionaire!"
The name is a pseudonym of course, though a former girlfriend used to claim it came from an Old French term meaning "owner of 1,000 serfs." Millionaire — or Scott Richardson, as he used to be known — actually lifted it from an I Dream of Jeannie episode and printed it on a label for a party he attended in 1981. The tag stuck, and he now says, "If I ever hear anybody using my other name, it's either my mother or my lawyer."
These days Tony Millionaire is practically a brand name, attached to a syndicated weekly comic strip, Maakies; a series of comic books called Sock Monkey; the graphic novels Uncle Gabby and Billy Hazelnuts; and an animated cartoon, The Drinky Crow Show, which will make its first appearance in the US on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim on Sunday at 11:45pm. (From today, the episode will also be available on adultswim.com; whether there will be more depends on how this one goes over.)
Spun off from by the Maakies comic strip, The Drinky Crow Show is about an alcoholic, suicidal crow and his sidekick, a dim-witted libidinous monkey named Uncle Gabby, shipmates on a 19th-century whaling ship captained by a crusty Ahab type who happens to have a sexpot daughter. Like the strip, the cartoon is graphically elegant, done in a style reminiscent of early comics masters like Winsor McKay and Johnny Gruelle (who drew Raggedy Ann); the content, on the other hand, comes bubbling up from a part of the imagination that polite cartoonists lock away.
This first episode begins with a whoosh of crow vomit and ends with a squirt of bug excrement. In between there are floggings, decapitations and dismemberments, cannonballs that go right through characters, leaving perfect round holes, and one instance each of copulation between whales and between a fly and a cockroach. The hero, Drinky Crow, rescues the ship and Uncle Gabby, or half of him, anyway, with quick thinking and artistic enterprise — when he's not blotto, that is, a condition indicated by a giant X where his eye should be and little bubbles circling his head.
This troubled, bibulous little bird is in many ways Millionaire's alter ego and also his savior. He came up with the character in the winter of 1993, during an extremely low period in his life. He was living in New York then, and barely scraping by, as he had been since getting out of art school, by making architectural drawings of houses. But that winter his business had dwindled, and as he recalled recently: "My girlfriend said, 'You're not going to be able to pay the rent, are you?' She said it would be better if I moved out, and so I was broke, sleeping on couches, begging food from friends. One night I went to this bar in Brooklyn, Six Twelve in Williamsburg, and on a napkin I started drawing a cartoon about a crow who got drunk and blew his brains out. The bartender said, 'Every time you draw one of those, I'll give you a beer,' so I just kept drawing. He photocopied them, and pretty soon they became a kind of trademark for the bar. The bartender even made a Styrofoam model of Drinky Crow."
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