Tony Millionaire
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Tony Millionaire is one of the best comic book creators in the world. Every cool underground scene is aware of his creations such as Maakies [which runs in over ten of the US’ largest weekly newspapers] and his lovely creation Sock Monkey. Millionaire has just added another soon to be classic character to his pantheon, Billy Hazelnuts. The new hardcover from Fantagraphics combines the nuttiness of Drinky Crow with the gentle innocence of Sock Monkey.

Buy Billy Hazelnuts

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Tony Millionaire: I was just telling my wife to get off the phone with her jabbering gossips. She’s got all these new friends from school because our kids just started going to school. So suddenly we’re thrown into a whole suburban world that we always feared. It turns out that they’re actually all right.

DRE: Where do you live now?

TM: Pasadena, California.

DRE: That’s a pretty suburban area.

TM: It is. It’s where you move when you’re living in LA and you have kids. You go, “well, we better move to a place where you’re not nervous about somebody putting a bullet through the window or hipsters crawling in your front door.”

DRE: Hipsters [laughs].

TM: Your buddies come by your place at two o’clock in the morning, going “what’s the problem? How come you don’t want to go out?” I’m like “Get the fuck out of here! My kids are sleeping!” So the best place to go is Pasadena because it’s so close to the city. But it has gardens and everybody’s got a little house and trees and stuff, it’s nice.

DRE: Do your friends still come by in them middle of the night?

TM: They don’t because no one wants to drive all the way up to Pasadena. It is 20 minutes away. I lived in Silver Lake and Silver Lake is like the hipster central of Los Angeles. At first I lived in New York where I met everybody in my life. Then I moved to LA because my wife was out here and we lived in Silver Lake because she’s an actress.

DRE: Was it just a coincidence that your kids are going to school and now you have Billy Hazelnuts which is appropriate for kids?

TM: I’ve actually been doing a bunch of stuff that’s appropriate for kids with the Sock Monkey stuff. I show them some of the Drinky Crow stuff but then by the time they’re old enough to read they’re going to be in trouble because some of the stuff gets pretty obscene.

DRE: Sock Monkey is good for kids but Billy Hazelnuts is even more so.

TM: It is. I didn’t want to come right straight out and do a “children’s book” because generally children’s books are not fun for anybody but the kids. There are some children’s books that don’t bore you to death so you can read them for the kids but the feeling of this is that it was an adult book but I just cut out all the super violence, sexual innuendo and the booze so now I’ve got a book that six year olds and seven year olds can read too.

DRE: Was it really an adult book before?

TM: No, it’s just an adventure of a character who goes through his life. Mostly it’s being sold to college kids and people that like good comics.

DRE: What was the inspiration for Billy?

TM: I wanted to do something that was kind of autobiographical because I was told that the best writing that you do is when you do about something that you know. That’s why Maakies is so good, is because it’s really about my days when I was in New York just completely drunk running around with maniacs all the time. Every time they would say something funny I would jot it down and they would say, “Watch out he’s going to steal it.” But now my life has changed to the point where I’ve been tamed. That is because I met my wife Becky [Thyre] and it was my time to be tamed anyway. I’m getting to old for that super craziness. So it’s a story of how a creature is formed by the events and circumstances around his environment and then he becomes tamed by the love of this little girl. Then for drama you have him go back into the creepier dark side and then he gets burned. Then he plucks all the bats out of his head and becomes a hollow shell and has to go back home. So it’s the story of a little girl that tames a wild man.

DRE: [laughs] Is that what Becky did?

TM: I didn’t even realize I was doing that until I was halfway through the book. It’s like, “oh, wait a minute; this is the story of me.” I just liked the idea of having a character who was pushed around by different characters until a little girl takes him in.

DRE: So Becky was the inspiration for the little girl?

TM: Yeah, that’s why I changed her name to Becky halfway through the book.

DRE: Most guys who do stuff that isn’t straight up autobiographical don’t even realize what they’re doing may be autobiographical or if they do they don’t really care.

TM: Yeah, with my stuff, I always felt like it’s got to really work on a lot of different levels and it’s got to really have some kind of deeper meaning to it. I’m not talking about morals or something but it’s got to have some deeper story to it. You watch the Sopranos and you see that there is all this underlying story that connects to all the other stories in the show.

DRE: It didn’t seem like you changed your art style much for Billy.

TM: I didn’t change a whole lot. For the Sock Monkey stuff I would just take the real sock monkey and put it on a Victorian stairway and then draw it. For Maakies I just draw crazy characters all over the place. I look up some old ships online or in old books that I have but then I super cartoonize that. For Billy Hazelnuts I wanted to go halfway in between. It’s a real world but it follows its own rules as far as drawing style goes. But it’s a little bit loose and I can bend it a little bit so I’m not tied down to the exact curve of the bow of the ark in every drawing.

DRE: Was doing Billy a different mindset than Maakies?

TM: It was. When the Maakies comic strip got taken by Saturday Night Live almost ten years ago to do these cartoons, I was just shocked. I just couldn’t believe that anybody would want to do it because this stuff is so nihilistic. These are cartoons about blowing your brains out and guzzling rum but they wanted to do it. Then I kept getting these calls about doing a Sock Monkey and I thought “Oh, that’d be great. I’d love to get all the money and I don’t even care if they ruin it. I asked them what kind of movie they would make out of it and they were like, “Well it’s like a Victorian Toy Story,” and I was like “ok, whatever.” So I went to pitch meeting after pitch meeting after pitch meeting.” Agents were lugging me around Hollywood and producers were saying, “so weird.” But I know that it wasn’t weird in concept. What was weird was that I didn’t have a script where they could say, “oh, now I see what it is.” Finally I said, “you know what, maybe I should actually do something for these Hollywood guys. So I thought of Billy Hazelnuts which was a story kicking around in the back of my head. I figured that’s a story with a fully rounded story arc. Also Fantagraphics kept bugging me to do a full length graphic novel because they sell well, better than comic books. So I just started writing that and it turned out to be really good and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.

DRE: How tough was that writing process for you?

TM: I thought it was going to be a lot harder than it was. Just like anything, you take it one step at a time. I started with the basic plot at first and I fleshed that out. Then I would work on it then work on something else and then go back to it. So it was a very gradual process of trying to think of a story. I think that’s probably the way most writers work. I don’t think you just sit down with a typewriter and just start out with word one.

DRE: What was the process for drawing Billy then?

TM: First I write notes and then I get ideas for the grander scheme of the whole book. Then I write down a couple of notes, like maybe at this point with the alligator, wings pop out and it starts flying. Then after I get the story fleshed out, then I’ll start doing thumbnails. But I’ll divide it up into three acts like with the thumbnail sketches I’ll start off one but I’ll trail it off because I won’t know how many pages it will go. So I’ll have these long pieces of paper with these thumbnail sketches and I’ll do a little story in thumbnails. Maybe it’ll be three or four pages and then another one will be 16 pages and I just keep letting them go until it seems to have petered out and then I start a new one. So it is all mapped and plotted out. Then when I finally get the story done in thumbnail sketches, I take each page and write out all the dialogue. Then I’ll be in my office about 9 pm where I’ll crack open the first Budweiser and start drinking because when I draw, I draw drunk.

DRE: Are you serious?

TM: I got to do pencil sketches first because I don’t want to be too drunk, but then by the time I’m working into the inks that’s when the booze kicks in. But there’s no way I can sit there sober and draw, I’d just get too bored. Sometimes by the end of the page I would have to actually get up in the morning and go look at it and like, “oh nuts, I got too drunk by the end of this one.” So I’d have to do the last panel over again. I don’t recommend this for everyone because most people can’t draw drunk.

DRE: Where’s the family when you’re drinking and drawing?

TM: They’re in bed asleep. I stay up until three o’clock in the morning. Luckily my wife doesn’t mind that I sleep late. She lets me sleep until like 10:30 or so.

DRE: How about the character designs?

TM: They evolved over a period of time. Before I did the story I had to draw Billy Hazelnut over and over because I thought the character looked ridiculous. First he was a little rag doll with button eyes but that was too cutesy and then he was a fairy with a big head. I kept going and going until finally I got the idea that he’s made out of cake and garbage and sewer stuff. Then for the rest of the characters I just had to do the same thing. The alligators were the easiest because they were just pieces of toys all bolted together and then you put scary teeth and sunglasses on them and you’re all set.

DRE: I read that you’re pitching a Maakies cartoon.

TM: Yeah, we got a pilot deal with Adult Swim. They gave us a deal to do a pilot for the Drinky Crow Show. Fortunately I hooked up with this great TV producer named Eric Kaplan who’s producing it with an animation company is based in Romania. Eric was a writer on Futurama and a producer and writer on Malcolm in the Middle. So he knows how to write stories for TV, which is so much different than writing books. I’ll be writing like some dialogue for the characters and he’ll be like, “Wait a minute; what are you doing? You can’t do that, that’s sounds stupid. It will sound like the guy’s pretending to talk fast if you write it like that.” So he’s teaching me all this stuff about writing and he’s writing most of it himself. Thing is, his company works with CGI and the people at Adult Swim said, “No computers because we don’t want this to look like Jimmy Neutron or Toy Story or something.” For some reason they just don’t like CGI and I agreed because I saw the first test of the Drinky Crow Show in CGI and they look plastic. My idea was to take the CGI model of each character and then just do a drawing of the textures and then wrap that around the models so that it looks like my comic strip but with the characters in 3D walking around.

DRE: How long will each episode be?

TM: 15 minutes.

DRE: What’s the plot of the first one?

TM: It’s about Drinky Crow who’s sad because his girlfriend left him, so he gets drunk. He puts an anchor around his neck and goes down into the ocean to kill himself. But he sees a mermaid and she gives him hope. So the whole rest of the episode is about him trying to get back to that mermaid with the help of Uncle Gabby the monkey. It’s very funny with a lot of fighting with French alligators. Also Adult Swim asked me to make it as obscene as I could.

DRE: Are you going to be executive producer and all that?

TM: See I don’t know exactly what the titles all boiled down to. But art director, executive producer, whatever they call us. I don’t even know what that word producer actually means. They throw it on top of anybody they can’t figure out what to do with.

DRE: [laughs] Are you getting the same people to voice it that voiced it in the short years ago?

TM: No, there’s totally different voices. We were really lucky that my wife knows Tom Kenny so he’s doing Drinky Crow.

DRE: Oh wow!

TM: Yeah, he’s doing this great voice too. It’s kind of a Bowery Boys type voice which I would never expect Drinky Crow to have. But Tom just tried it out and it sounded so funny. For Gabby we got Dave Herman who is very good because he’s got that frustrated, pissed off attitude. The role of the captain’s daughter is being played by my wife Becky Thyre.

DRE: Since you did Billy Hazelnuts to show around in Hollywood, how is that going?

TM: The Billy thing is going really well because some agents at William Morris got a hold of it and now they’re pitching it around town. Who knows what will happen, but it looks good.

DRE: Are you working on another book already?

TM: Yeah, I’ve already started on Billy Hazelnuts II. I’m also working on a four part Sock Monkey book. I’m going back to the old style Sock Monkey so it’s not for kids anymore. It’s back to the original stuff where things start to get eaten. It’s not sexual but it’s a little bit of a harder adventure.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Tony+Millionaire/