"I learned that holding down a regular job just wasn't going to ever happen for me, so I started knocking on doors and asking rich people if they wanted a pen and ink drawing of their house for fifty bucks. This went pretty well, I managed to earn enough doing that to stay drunk untill I was almost forty, then the despair and horror of it all caught up with me, so I decided I better do something to give myself a little bit of honor. Cartooning saved the day."
Tony Millionaire is the creator of the wildly popular
syndicated
comic strip,
Maakies. Maakies is one of the most popular weekly comic strip in
North America, running weekly in
Seattle,
New York,
Albuquerque,
Oklahoma City,
Cleveland, and
Vancouver, among other cities. The strip also had a run as an animated segment on television's
Saturday Night Live. Millionaire also creates the ongoing adventures of
Sock Monkey, published by
Dark Horse Comics.
His rather
dark humour and off-colour interviews make him an entertaining and intriguing figure, to say the least. Millionaire has been named "Best
Cartoonist" four times by readers of The
New York Press.
Millionaire was born in
1956 and raised in
Glouchester,
Massachusetts. He attended the
Massachusetts College of Art.
Alcohol is a running theme in both Millionaire's life and his art, as witnessed in his illustrations of drunkenness and
alcoholism and his off-the-cuff remarks about
liver damage and
liquor preferences.
Having only recently discovered the work of Tony Millionaire, I must say I'm no
expert on the history of his comics. However, his blackest of
black humour makes one
chuckle and then be
ashamed to crack that smile (and trust me, you will
smile more times than not).