Sock Monkey: Uncle Gabby

"My relationship with Tony Millionaire’s work is ambivalent. He’s an astonishing graphic artist. I’ve heard it said that he started drawing on a napkin in his local bar, and the guy behind the bar said, ‘I’ll give you a free beer for every cartoon that you do.’ So for some years, he drew for beer. And then he created a strip for The Village Voice called Maakies . The characters are the same characters, really, as in Uncle Gabby : a monkey toy made out of a stuffed sock, and a crow. But in Maakies they’re usually crew on a sailing ship, and they are alcoholics who are always on the brink of existential despair. Maakies is a really, really dark strip about alcoholism, full of violence, full of sadness and guilt and anguish. And it’s not funny. I mean, it’s intriguing; but there’s no lightness there. And then weirdly, Millionaire does the Sock Monkey stories alongside Maakies, with different iterations of the same characters. In this one, the sock monkey is called Uncle Gabby. I love this book because it’s a meditation on memory, on our relationship with our past. Uncle Gabby is plagued by memories of things that couldn’t possibly have happened. He remembers events that are incompatible with the life that he’s living. He decides that he has to resolve that anomaly: he has to find out which of his pasts is true, the one he remembers or the one that ought logically to be true. It’s mostly black and white line art, switching to colour at the end, for a triumphant, breathtaking ending. It’s got a lot of emotional heft to it. As with Beanworld and Bone , the art is simple. Millionaire was very influenced by Johnny Gruelle, who created Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. You can see that especially in the characters who are like toys animated to life. There was a Sock Monkey story That Darn Yarn , which won the Eisner Award for the best humour comic. And I remember reading it and thinking, “But it’s not funny! You’re not meant to laugh at this!” There’s a lot of melancholy, a lot of quiet sad reflectiveness in the stories. But they are incredibly beautiful, and I think he’s a unique talent. . My contemporary list would have a lot of non-English stuff. There are so many amazing fantasy comics coming out on the continent at the moment… From Italy, Lorenzo Mattotti’s Garlandia is utterly amazing. There’s a guy named Burniat, who’s just done a book called Furieuse about King Arthur’s daughter. King Arthur is old and not what he used to be; he’s become a grumpy old tyrant. And he’s going to marry his daughter off to a nobleman, and she doesn’t want any part of it. One night, she’s lying in her bed and Excalibur comes along and says, ‘Look, you’re disappointed in what your dad is now. I’m disappointed in what he is too. Why don’t we just go on the road?’ So she just takes off with this magic sword… It’s a terrific exploration of gender roles and class divisions in a mediaeval society. It’s absolutely wonderful. Joann Sfarr’s The Rabbi’s Cat is amazing. There’s a book by a guy named Tim Probert, Lightfall , which is a YA book about a little girl who meets a monster and they have to try and save the world; the light is going out of their world, and they have to find a way to bring it back. There’s an Image book called Head Lopper , which is about a hero who kills monsters for a living, usually by chopping their heads off… I think there is more work. Comics have become culturally mainstream, which didn’t happen that recently – it happened because of books like Sandman . There was a moment when that secondary market opened up, when comics become routinely collected into trade paperbacks. That changes everything. I think it has led to an enormous increase in output. And of course there’s Sturgeon’s Law, that ninety percent of everything is garbage, so there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s not great; but it does feel like we’re living through a golden age. Especially if you go to France! If you go to any bookshop in France and go to the bandes dessinées section, you see this extraordinary plethora of formats and styles and genres that you would never encounter in English language books. Much it now is getting reprinted – Fantagraphics in America does English language reprints of a lot of continental books."