Book Review: Something to Keep the Coffee Table Company

The Art of Tony Millionaire

by Tony Millionaire
Dark Horse, 200 pp., $39.95

Hot Potatoe: [Sic]

by Marc Bell
Drawn & Quarterly, 273 pp., $39.95

Two beautiful books considered here, both of them for your coffee table and the coffee table of your mind, both of them crowding the blunt and knobby apex of what's best and funniest and most poignant about comic art.

From Drawn & Quarterly comes Hot Potatoe: [Sic], a compendium of "fine ahtwerks" by Canada's Marc Bell, little known outside the world of alternative comics, whose complex drawings within drawings within drawings are festooned with puns linguistic and visual and resemble masterpieces penned at the crossroads of personal whimsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder by some precocious 8-year-old. These images – ink and watercolor, single-main-figure and circuitous strips, from 2001 to 2008 – are presented full-color on fine glossy paper and interspersed with essays by the artist's cronies and co-conspirators, the accompanying texts flirting with fantasy almost as deeply as the illustrations do. Of special note in this collection are the many pages reproducing Bell's cardboard cutout constructions, wherein his weirdly populated universe emerges into almost three quirky dimensions beneath your fingertips.

Dark Horse Books, on the other hand, presents an artist who needs little introduction anywhere. Still, The Art of Tony Millionaire is introduced by no less a light than Elvis Costello and serves as a career-thus-far retrospective for the creator of the alt-comic Maakies strip and Sock Monkey comics, frequent illustrator for the McSweeney's parade of publications and beyond, and unparalleled limner of New England architecture and nautical trappings. Millionaire, as towering in person as his talent is in abstraction, has long treated the world to a contrasting mix of tones, his comics ranging from the scatalogically depraved and relentlessly alcoholic debacles of Drinky Crow to the beautiful, heartbreaking adventures of Sock Monkey and his friends and many shades between. (Heartbreaking, did I say? See the two-page spread Millionaire drew to commemorate the death of Raggedy Ann & Andy creator Johnny Gruelle's 13-year-old daughter. See it, friend, and try to hold back the tears.) Here are full-page panels of sailing vessels and cartoon loveliness, portraits of celebrities and artwork for records by Costello (who supplies the introduction) and They Might Be Giants, photomontages of early works and sketchbook outtakes and Millionaire ephemera. As with the Marc Bell compendium above, this gorgeous collection is further improved by text: Generous chunks of autobiography provide backstage glimpses of the artist's life and works, from his early days drawing commissioned portraits of rich people's houses to his drunken, college-age performance-art hijinks, his freelancing for alt-weeklies in New York and L.A., his Sock Monkey gig at Dark Horse, and the brief airing of The Drinky Crow Show on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program. Yes – oh my, yes – this volume comes ever so highly recommended.