The Adventures of Sock Monkey-- Tony Millionaire

How does one describe Tony Millionaire's work? Is it salty like a sailor? is it about drunken toys like Uncle Gabby The Sock Monkey, or Drinky Crow, a sawdust stuffed crow made out of an old pea coat with button eyes. Tony Millionaire is one of my favorite cartoonists. His cartoons seem to escape the panels. He varies the size of his panels and sometimes lets the word slip out of the balloons.

I am not a cartoonist, but I like the elegant black and white ink drawings he uses. They are often quite detailed. I also like the setting of his cartoons; a kind of child's 19th century dreamland populated by irreverent old fashioned children's toys. These toys are boisterous, violent, destructive, vivid and drunken. They are always fighting with mice, birds, bats, alligators, and other small animals.


In The Adventures of Sock Monkey, the places where the stories occur are interesting; aboard old sailing ships and victorian houses. Much of the time the ships or houses end up getting burned down.

Thre are some very interesting moments in the panels. I like when Uncle Gabby the Sock Monkey is talking to the shrunken head from Borneo and I also like when Drinky Crow sings O' Whisky Made The Bosun Call. I also like that when grownups are drawn in the panels, the sock monkey and crow turn into ordinary toys.

The Adventures of Sock Monkey won the Eisner Award for best comic. This graphic novel is a graphic novel which I can read again and again. Despite the toys, this is not a comic for small children. Tony Millionaire has a separate site for his Maakies comic strip. http://www.maakies.com/

I read this as part of the Graphic Novels challenge. It is the first graphic novel which I read as my promise to read six graphic novels this year.

Afternoon Thoughts

Good afternoon. I started reading Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America by Eric Jay Dolin, c2007, W.W. Norton. This book is both grotesque and salty at the same time. The descriptions of the American colonists watching for beached whales then cutting them up and rendering them for their oil is over the top.

There is a lot of interesting historical material. Apparently, Moby Dick, is based off the story of a whale called Mocha Dick named after the isle of Mocha off the coast of Chile. There are a lot of interesting tidbits like this throughout the book. I am almost up to the first selection of black and white pictures. If you can handle some grotesque descriptions it is interesting to read.

Three books came in for me today from interchange, two of them are graphic novels, the first is Billy Hazelnuts by Tony Millionaire, and the second is The Adventure of Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey. I have a fond place in my heart for this cartoon because when I was a child, I had a sock monkey toy. It was one of my favorite toys along with my stuffed buffalo. My "lumpalo" as I used to call it. The third book is The Ten Cent Plague, The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu, Farrar Strauss Giroux, c2008.


I couldn't find a public domain picture of a Sock Monkey from the internet, so I took one from Amazon. I know, it looks like I am trying to sell something. Here it is:



Anyways while looking around the internet, I found an interesting article. Time magazines The Top 25 Blogs. This link is practically everywhere on dozens of different blogs. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1725323_1725329,00.html .

What is interesting about this listing is that only one of them has bookish origins, Freakonomics which came from a bestselling book. I took some time to look at the different blogs to see what I saw that was common in design. Most of the blogs are three column blogs, they have a black on white background. Most use images in every single post. There are youtube videos liberally spread throughout the blogs as well. There is usually a blogroll of related sites. All of them cover popular subjects, not things like literature or crafts. I also noticed that most of them have a comments function, a share this article function.

I spent a bit today picking out poetry books for a poetry open mike tomorrow as well as choosing a few poems to read as an opener. I picked out a poem by Bob Kaufman, one of the beat poets to read as the first poem.

Today, I'm feeling a bit scattered. I have a lot of little things to do which are all over the place. I suggested several graphic novels from the February Diamond Comic Books Distributor Bestseller list earlier today to order.