City Desk: Funnies, Revisited - 'Maakies' comic strip - Brief Article

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

Considering that the comic strip was invented in New York City, the form has fallen on evil days here. The tabloids carry only syndicated strips, while the Times shuns comics as a badge of class distinction. That leaves the downtown weeklies.

The only interest in the Village Voice these days is to see what new ways Nat Hentoff will contrive to outrage abortion supporters, and the cartoons partake of the paper's general tiredness. The alternative torch has been passed to the New York Press, where my favorite strip is called "Maakies." I don't think the name means anything; if it does, I probably don't want to know.

The two main characters are an ape and a crow, who belong, Patrick O'Brian's fans will be happy to learn, to the crew of an 18th-century warship. Their formal enemies are crocodiles with French accents in plumed and braided uniforms, though German turtles in World War I U- boats occasionally sail by. But the main theme of the strip is the heroes' private adventures.

Although the crow calls the ape "Uncle Gabby," their real bond is alcoholism (the crow's name is "Drinky Crow"). The crow drinks somewhat more often; When he turns a bottle up in his beak, the contents rush out with the sound "Dook Dook Dook." Often their binges knock them out, sometimes lethally.

But booze is not the only way Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby come to harm. Every other week, one or both of them are shot, stabbed, burned, blown up, mutilated, infected, eaten by sharks, clawed by bears, swallowed by whales, or otherwise damaged or destroyed. Once they were ripped limb from limb by a mechanical vulture quoting Nietzsche. Once a girl that Uncle Gabby had taken a fancy to told him, "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine," so he sliced off his lips with scissors. For several weeks running, the strip followed a family of mites that had taken up residence in the late crow's skull (the mites formed a tiny rock band). Then the crow's soul spoke to them. They asked if he felt anything in the afterlife. "I am strapped to a tornado of pain," was the answer. "Bogus!" they replied. And yet, after every little annihilation has run its course, ape and crow return, stewed but whole.

Below the main strip runs a smaller one that, while rarely violent, can be even grimmer. Probably that is because the characters here (mostly ordinary men and women) are depicted in ordinary social situations. Recently, a vaguely amphibian husband and wife had the following conversation. SHE: You didn't drink today? HE: No, I'm still drunk from last night. SHE: Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo! HE: Ha Ha Ha Ha! "Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo" and "Ha Ha Ha Ha" were repeated three times, and I thought, Yes, that's what alcoholic families are like.

These brutal and senseless events are drawn in a style that is careful, even lapidary. The artist, who signs himself Tony Millionaire, has a definite literary turn of mind, and his characters (except for the mites) have a taste for highfalutin rhetoric. Sometimes they speak in verse.

Are there any conclusions to be drawn, aside from the obvious one that the nation's number-one drug problem is still John Barleycorn?

The audience for Uncle Gabby and Drinky Crow is obviously male. Women are not so openly interested in destruction; they tend to say "Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo," not "Ha Ha Ha Ha." Women get eating disorders and illegitimate children; the worst that can happen to them is illness, degradation, and poverty. Men fight, commit crimes, go to jail, and die young. Look at the statistics-or "Maakies."

The tempo and the detail of the strip are up-to-the-minute, especially the detail. Wile E. Coyote explodes, but never gets his snout sliced off. We've come a long way from George Orwell's 1939 look at English boys' weeklies, where he got his knickers in a twist over the pernicious example of vivid boxing prose. My only question to the horrified reader is, Do you have a television in your house? If you do, then the game is already over for your children. It does not matter what they watch. The pacing and the unresponsiveness of the medium itself will lead to some measure of frustration and disengagement; ultimately to Drinky Crow. One hopes, not to being like him; but certainly to finding him funny.

On the other hand, the content of the downtown comic strips (and the best in the New York Press-"Underworld," "Steven," "Story Minute"-all have broadly similar content) is as old as the hills. Fantasy figures die a thousand deaths, but they always come back to get bounced around again. Is that a sad ending, or a happy one? It is an ending that puts the lacrimae rerum in a manageable form. The readers of downtown weeklies are 20-year-olds, and the 20-year-old in us all. I was about 20 when I had my first experience of contemporaries and friends dying, or having close calls, and I suppose that is a normal trajectory. Our skulls will all be rehearsal studios for mites. If you tell the story in ten books of hexameters, it is epic. If you draw it in four panels, it's funny.