Flak Magazine: Review of Maakies, 10-15-00

After all, what is the pure sublime bliss of true, cascading love, if it's not set against a backdrop of romantic humiliation, degradation, and sorrowful loss?

It's the end of a romantic comedy, that's what.

And so it can be argued that the rich contrast between the painful and the transcendently positive is what makes life's distinguishing events truly intense, memorable and vivid.

And so with few exceptions, (Jim's Journal, MTV's "Undressed," "Cheers") this recipe makes for the strongest, most fortifying, most disturbing art.

"Maakies" fits the bill. It is the perfect blend of ethereal wine and the rank liquid of the world's many gutters. "Maakies" poses as a comic strip, but it's really a shorthand for the misery and squalor of the world, laced with an incredibly warped and robust vein of black humor and, occasionally, arcing poetic insight.

Set in a surreal, historically grounded seaborne universe of pirates and buccaneers, "Maakies" follows the disturbingly unhappy adventures of Drinky Crow, a cute lil' alcoholic consistently bent on consuming his fix, and Uncle Gabby, a monkey with a penchant for rum and battle. Many episodes are gleefully, savagely violent. Quite a few make some sort of reference to sex, or sexual dysfunction. Suicide, (typically by gunshot) is ever-present — Uncle Gabby and Drinky Crow die dozens of bloody deaths before the book is finished.

(Click here for a Maakies cartoon)

This said, there's a beauty to Maakies few books — or comic strips — can match. There are odes to the love affair between Saturn and the Chrysler Building. There is a band of earmites (Might Mite and the Ear Mites) that communes with the dead by climbing into the ears of a skeleton, only to discover that the afterworld is "like being strapped to a tornado of pain." There are balloon flights, majestic sailing ships, Greek statues, dancing brains, the philosopher/murderer D'Arcangelo — in short, a dazzling gothic pantheon of wondrous crap.

"Maakies" swings between the sublime and the puerile so often, and so quickly, that reading the book can be a profoundly disturbing experience. But artist Tony Millionaire is no slouch with the pen — even when the strip descends to witless depths of base physical humor (much like the similarly excellent strip Milk and Cheese), Millionaire tends to redeem himself by the care with which he inks his creations.

Maakies is a nationally syndicated strip, so if you don't get the book, you can always check out the strip in the likes of The Stranger, the New Times or "Saturday Night Live." But anyone who loves a good sick laugh — or the gentle, lacerating poetry of pain — is well-advised to put down their doubloons and pick up a copy of "Maakies."

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)