By John Strausbaugh

Comics
Dook Dook NY

After four years of exile in the L.A. area, Drinky Crow returns to New York City for a brief visit next week. Uncle Gabby, Sock Monkey, Mr. Crow, Phoebe and Tony Millionaire are expected to accompany him. Fucky, however, will probably not.

The occasion is the celebration of two new Millionaire books: a new "Maakies" collection, The House at Maakies Corner (Fantagraphics), and The Glass Doorknob (Dark Horse), his new "Sock Monkey" book for children. He’ll be signing them Weds., Nov. 13, at Jim Hanley’s Universe. The following evening, Millionaire’s solo exhibition opens at Clayton Patterson Gallery on the Lower East Side, where he’s showing original artwork, full-page comics and book-cover art.

Asked how he’s liked living in L.A., Millionaire replies, "I love L.A. Actually I got out of L.A., which is why I love it so much. I moved out to Pasadena, which is a totally different world." He lives in a place actually called Bungalow Heaven. "They called it that when they turned it into a landmark district to preserve it, because people were starting to tear down these Craftsman bungalows to build apartment buildings."

It was the imminent birth of his daughter Phoebe, now one year old, that got Millionaire into children’s books. "When I was thinking about having a kid, I realized that there’s a giant industry in children’s books," he says. "I realized I’d probably be doing a lot better, since the comics industry is just failing. There’s hardly any comics shops anymore, and you can only buy comics in comics shops, which is ridiculous. When I was a kid you bought them in the drugstore. I love comics and I’ll always draw comics, but I need something to pay for the diapers...

"I never really looked at the comics as something that was going to make me money," he goes on. "It’s always been the illustration work. One job for The New Yorker will get you as much as a whole comic book will." He is doing some work for D.C. Comics, including a Batman story for the Bizarro series.

Drawing for kids, he says, he’s had to repress a certain urge for sex and violence seen in his "Maakies" work for grownups, as well as in earlier incarnations of "Sock Monkey." "Kids love violence, but the moms won’t buy it," he observes. "I can do scary stuff, but it can’t be really obvious. Like I can’t have anybody torturing bluejays. I can have them looking around corners and being scared."

So he’s not drawing Fucky anymore?

"No, Fucky’s gone for a while," he laughs. "But I still have ‘Maakies’ for all my twisted shit."

Asked what kind of research he did before beginning to draw kids’ books, he says, "I got some advice from a couple people on marketing, but basically I just talked to all the new-mother types in my life to see what they liked." He tells me that when you’re gearing your work for children, "You start seeing these little things you focused on as a kid. The heater vents in the house, where you drop a crayon down there and it melts and you just stare at it all day long? You start noticing that sort of stuff again."

He says that book publicists sometimes forget to keep the "Maakies" marketing for adults scrupulously separate from the pitches to the "Sock Monkey" crowd. Once they confused Sock Monkey’s innocuous friend Mr. Crow with the "Maakies" reprobate Drinky Crow. "I had to catch them and say, ‘Don’t mention drinking! Mommies are looking!’"

A few years ago Millionaire produced six episodes of one-minute animated "Maakies" cartoons for Saturday Night Live. After some internal wrangling, only two ran. All six are now available on a DVD, God Hates Cartoons (Bright Red Rocket), with other animations by Sam Henderson, Jim Woodring, Ivan Brunetti and others. "I’m always sniffing around producers’ and directors’ back doors to try to get something happening with [an animated] ‘Sock Monkey,’" he says. "So far it’s lots of promises and nothing ever happens."

But then, L.A. was slow to catch on to "Maakies" as well. It’s such a non-print culture, isn’t it?

"It really is. I was so surprised when I came to town and ‘Maakies’ started running in the LA Weekly, and I got zero e-mails. Every other time that I got in a new newspaper I’d get 10 or 20 e-mails in the first couple of weeks. I thought, ‘Nobody’s reading it, I guess.’" Then he heard that a tattoo parlor on Sunset Blvd. was giving away free Drinky Crow tattoos, just because the owner loves the strip. "So far I hear about 20 people have gotten it."

As for his exile from the East Coast, he says, "I miss New York every day. I’m so looking forward to coming back. I just want to walk around the city for a couple of days. You don’t get to walk down the streets here. You get run over. Or pulled over. People are like, ‘Why are you walking on your gas pedal-pushers?’"

Tony Millionaire signs copies of The House on Maakies Corner and The Glass Doorknob on Weds., Nov. 13, 4-7 p.m., at Jim Hanley’s Universe, 4 W. 33rd St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.), 268-7088. His exhibition opens Thurs., Nov. 14, 7-10 p.m., at the Clayton Patterson Gallery, 161 Essex St. (betw. Stanton & Houston Sts.), 477-1363.