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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Millionaire's Pièce de résistance, February 9, 2010
This review is from: Premillennial Maakies: The First Five Years (Hardcover)
If you've ever seen the Drinky Crow Show on Cartoon Networks Adult Swim this is pretty much it except in book form. Maakies is filled with drinking jokes and suicides and extreme violence and vomiting and sailing ships and French alligators and all the staples of the Drinky Crow Show except in this case everything is turned up to the maximum. Maakies is FAR raunchier when it comes to sexual jokes including humor about venereal diseases and infidelity and just about anything you can imagine. Tony Millionaire shows absolutely no restraint and nothing is taboo. Each page features one Maakies comic with a much smaller comic running along the bottom. The tiny comics tend to be much cruder and sometimes even references what's going on in the main comic. This comic within a comic is just one example of how Tony Millionaire operates by his own rules.
Tony Millionaire is a rare (perhaps unique) cartoonist who can write both children's books and books that should never be placed within twenty feet of a child. In fact Drinky Crow (who is literally named for his prolific drinking) is essentially Crow from Millionaires children's stories. The main character in some of his kid's books is a sock monkey named Uncle Gabby which is the same name as the drunken Irish Monkey from Maakies. It's all very complicated and God help anyone who buys an Uncle Gabby book expecting to get sock monkey and instead finds Maakies.
Much of the humor draws from pure shock value but if you're into this kind of humor be prepared because these are the kind of jokes that will send milk streaming out your nose. In one comic the `Captain's Daughter' tells Uncle Gabby that she will never kiss lips the have touched alcohol so he slices his own lips off. The joke is the hideous sight of Uncle Gabby with teeth exposed looking for a kiss. This kind of mutilation runs all through the book and it can get quite grotesque. In another comic Uncle Gabby's girlfriend complains that he refuses to trim his nails. In the next panel he's on a motorcycle and crashes causing him to slide across the pavement sheering off his face and toe nails. In the final panel his girlfriend shows her appreciation for his trimmed nails as he sits in a hospital bed with literally no face.
Tony Millionaire does a lot of experimentation in these comics. Generally Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby are drawn in cartoon fashion but all of a sudden Millionaire may choose to draw them very realistically or with dinosaur type proportions or as Crow and Sock Monkey or even as photographs of stuffed animals. In one comic he drew Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby as a bird and simian but switched the species with each panel. Many of the cartoons are nothing more than poetry, some are written in a foreign language and one was completely unfinished with no dialogue or inking done.
Maakies reminds me a lot of Underworld by Kaz which started a couple of years prior but I have to say that the transition to television seemed to go far better for Millionaire. I saw one episode of Kaz's `Zoot Rumpus' and never laughed once (and I'm someone who thinks Kaz is a genius). The Drinky Crow Show on the other hand was extremely funny, although it unfortunately got cancelled after only a few months. Maakies is the kind of book you will either treasure or throw down in disgust. Millionaire could be described as incredibly bold and creative or vile and perverse. This collection contains his earliest works and I felt that the comics improved as the book went along while he was finding his groove. I'm going to give the book five stars because I found the writing hilarious, the art well done and the entire presentation by Fantagraphics to be top notch.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The fear of being near you sober., November 5, 2009
This review is from: Premillennial Maakies: The First Five Years (Hardcover)
This eventually would go on, in my opinion, to be the best American comic strip since Krazy Kat. Here you can read where it all began, including, again in my opinion, its awkward first year or so. Don't worry, it eventually gets better. Way better.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Where have you been all my life?, July 2, 2007
This review is from: Premillennial Maakies: The First Five Years (Hardcover)
Somehow I missed the Maakies boat (ho man! I don't normally make puns...)
This comic never registered. Somehow I never noticed any articles on it.
Then one day I read an article about Tony Millionaire and Maakies and I thought,
"This looks interesting... where have I seen this before?". The comics were familiar.
I know I've seen them comic, but somehow in the entire decade of the 90's
Maakies just never quite registered with me.
So anyway, I got the book and realized I was missing out on brilliance.
The art is superb, but the demented humor is what puts it on my shelf
right next to my R. Crumb books...
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