LA Weekly

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.