Drinky Crow Drinks Again by Tony Millionaire

I've apparently never read a collection of Tony Millionare's Maakies comics. (Back in the early days of this blog, I posted about The Adventures of Sock Monkey and Billy Hazelnuts, but never the main stream of Millionaire's work.) I know I read Maakies in the New York Press during the years when alt-weeklies were a thing and I was regularly in Manhattan every week, but that was also a while ago.

But Drinky Crow Drinks Again, his 2016 collection, was available in my library app, and I thought it had been too long since I looked at his amazingly detailed, filth-filled, neo-Victorian, pseudo-classic-Sunday-comics art. (Millionaire is yet another artist whose work should be presented on larger pages than my tablet can handle - the modern digital world is convenient, but at the cost of being just that bit shittier and less pleasant than it used to be. That's not far from a Millionaire idea, actually.)

Drinks Again collects what seems to be the previous three or four years of Maakies - it's a horizontally-formatted book, with two strips to each page most of the time, but a few pages with single strips. There's also a lot of related illustrations presented full-page - roughly one after every six pages of strips - which could be new to this book or could have been various editorial, website, or other illustrations during the same period.

Maakies is not a strip concerned with continuities, so it doesn't really matter where everything appeared or what order they are in the book. This is probably roughly the end of print Maakies - Millionaire pulled the plug in 2016, as the last few alt-weeklies were dying slowly and painfully, though he later revived the strip online.

The main characters are a drunken monkey (Uncle Gabby) and a drunken crow (Drinky Crow), who are intermittently 19th century sailors of some kind and intermittently in the modern world, more or less. Each strip or drawing is a moment, a tiny story of its own - there are a few places in this book with a very light continuity from one strip to the next, but mostly in the occasional stories Millionaire tells of his younger days (generally the 1970s). There's a lot of scatology, which tends to follow from the massive amounts of drinking, and also a lot of violence and death (aimed outward or self-inflicted), also usually following from massive alcohol intake.

(I am not surprised to learn that Millionaire now is in recovery as an alcoholic; that was something of a gimmie.)

As always, Millionaire's style and substance are often jarringly incongruent: lovingly detailed depictions of landscapes and wooden ships filled with grotesque characters shitting themselves. That's the point, though: that's what Millionaire is doing. If you can enjoy that - preferably both sides, but at least one - you'll find things to love in Maakies.