Something to crow about

When a bartender offered him a free beer for every comic he drew, Tony Millionaire got to work. Never mind that Millionaire wasn’t a comic strip artist -- he was a painter and an illustrator -- but he’d just lost his girlfriend and his apartment, and he was looking for some relief.

And so Drinky Crow was born. The trigger-happy alcoholic bird is now the protagonist of a depraved weekly comic strip that was compiled this month into a book, “House at Maakies Corner” (Fantagraphics). Millionaire’s work also makes regular appearances in the New Yorker magazine and his feathered friend has even starred in a couple of animated shorts on “Saturday Night Live.” Not bad for a character that was created in a fit of desperation.

“I really hit bottom,” says Millionaire, who lives a far happier life these days with his wife and 1-year-old daughter in Pasadena. “With what I scraped together from the bottom, I created Drinky Crow, and a lot of people relate to that ... because there’s a time in your life when you think you are Drinky Crow. It’s not even about being drunk. It’s about just wanting to give up.”

“Maakies” chronicles the misadventures of the raven-feathered bird and his simian sidekick, Uncle Gabby, a duo always up to no good in their reckless use of firearms and self-destructive pursuit of alcohol and women. The comics aren’t especially hilarious, nor are they meant to be.

“ ‘Maakies’ is about the horror of being alive,” Millionaire says. “It’s not always about funny. I like to be very subtle and poignant sometimes, and sometimes something makes me laugh, so I have to do it.”

Comic Andy Dick observed that “reading Tony’s darkly luscious comics is like losing that still unacquired bitter reality taste for a moment.”

To counter some readers’ complaints that his strip should be funny all the time, Millionaire includes a second strip on the bottom of the first one. The miniature, secondary comics are on entirely different subjects, have quick punch lines and are far less elaborately drawn than the dense, pen-and-ink renderings of the main ones.

“I picture my strips as sort of taking place around the 1910s,” says Millionaire, whose comics often unfold on elaborate old ships and around Victorian mansions, though there is the occasional spaceship. “It’s comics,” he says with a shrug. “You can do whatever you want.”

The ships and mansions are throwbacks to Millionaire’s youth in Gloucester, Mass., where he spent a lot of time with his grandparents, both of whom were illustrators. At their house, Millionaire liked to flip through their collections of 1920s and 1930s newspaper comics, which were, along with the original “Winnie the Pooh” and “Raggedy Ann” books, the seeds of influence for his comics today.

It was his mother, however, who encouraged him to be an artist. A junior high art teacher, she did not allow coloring books in the house.

“She’d say, ‘If you want to color a picture, draw one first,’ ” says Millionaire, who is beginning to institute the same rule with his daughter. “I threw out my first coloring book last week.”

His daughter’s birth has been the inspiration for Millionaire’s recent foray into the children’s book world. Last year, Dark Horse comics released “Sock Monkey,” the first in his series of children’s books. “The Glass Doorknob,” the series’ second installment, came out in September.

Like “Maakies,” the “Sock Monkey” books feature a crow and a monkey, but the characters are not the same.

“I love the idea of a monkey and a crow. There’s something slightly scary and cute about both of them,” he says. But the “Sock Monkey” books are “more about beauty ... they’re more about what happens once you rise above it.”

Just as Millionaire has. It took years of struggling to make it as a painter and illustrator before he found success, which, for an artist, has come relatively late.

“It’s getting harder to write comics about the themes of depression and darkness now that I live in Pasadena surrounded by flowers and babies,” says Millionaire, 46. “I have to rely on my memory.”