Tony Millionaire

I recently emailed, asking him, "Though they give me a college education, I yearn to know, in three simple steps, how I can learn to draw like you."

To my happy surprise, he indeed responded, saying:

1. Get a bitch of a mother who bans coloring books from your house and instills in you an urgent and futile need to please her.
2. Drink so hard that the only job you can hold down is knocking on doors asking people if they want a drawing of their house for fifty bucks.
3. When approaching forty years of age, come to your senses with a shock of realization at your failure in everything but an ability to draw things and desperately send portfolios to every magazine in the country.

"Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
they lift their heavy lids, and look;
and, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
they read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, and most forget;
but either way, that and the child's unheeded dream is all the light of all their day."
- Sock Monkey

"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).