April punk’d.
“Oh, geeze,” says a friend of mine, who actually works in the industry, when I told him about the whole Tony Millionaire thing. “I just figured he was posting drunk again.”
You know, if Dirk Deppey were still kicking it, none of this would ever have gone as far as it did.
Oh, but that’s no excuse. I posted the link, and the write-up; I kicked it up to Atrios, who bit; and even though I admitted I was unsure of the whole shebang, I stacked the deck with I’d thought was a reasonably coherent translation of what it was Millionaire was reporting, but in retrospect, looks a little too much like me, who worked as a managing editor for a tiny little alternarag for a bit, imposing my own sense of what must have happened to make some sense out of what it was Millionaire was reporting. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why it’s probably a good idea I stay away from your more journalistic endeavors: I’m all too willing to carry water for whatever my immediate take on the story is (must be), skipping blithely down the paving stones of my own damned good intentions.
1995: Acting on a tip from Oklahomans for Children and Families, undercover police officers purchase adult comics from the box Planet Comics kept behind the front counter, where kids couldn’t see them. Then the shop was raided. The shop’s owners, Michael Kennedy and John Hunter, were charged with four felonies and four misdemeanors for selling adult comics to adults. The shop was evicted and had to relocate. Sales plummeted. Cops raided Hunter’s home and confiscated his computer. Somebody heaved a brick through the store’s window one night. A divorce was filed. Hunter and Kennedy plead guilty to reduced charges, got three-year deferred sentences and fines of $1,500 each. Bob Anderson, the president of Oklahomans for Children and Families, said his group was opposed to censorship, but “There is also material that is not illegal which is not suitable for children under [Oklahoma’s] harmful-to-minors law. And who buys comic books but younger children?”
(Then Oklahomans for Children and Families went after The Tin Drum. The ACLU shut them down, hard. They don’t even have a website anymore.)
“Attorney General Hardy Meyers’ office.”
“Um, hi. I’m trying to look into claims that—well, there’s a letter that apparently was written by Attorney General John Ashcroft directing state attorneys general to aid him in cleaning up comic strips? And I’m trying to find out if this letter was really written?”
“Goodness. It sounds like you need Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection. Hold on a moment.”
“Financial fraud—?”
“Hi, this is Kevin. I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number…”
I suppose the clues are there if you want to look for them. “I’m growing it for the ‘April Fools,’ says Uncle Gabby, after all. And even if Millionaire backed off from the absurd claim that the FCC made him do it, his story’s still incoherent at best. The way it’s written, it sounds almost as if the three editors who requested the change in wording did so under specific instructions from their attorney(s) general: as if these public servants were poring over pre-release copies of Maakies and Dwarf Attack to determine if younger readers might be harmed by anything these pen-and-ink contraptions might say, before publication. This is absurd, of course. —But if it is all a joke, why would Millionaire take it so far? Posting thick chunks of Ed Meese’s famous Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography report? Going on the record with The Pulse? —Verisimilitude, of course. What’s the use of a prankish publicity stunt if you cave on the first salvo? And he’s been notably reticent about letting slip any actual facts that might back up what he’s saying: “I find it interesting that fuck you,” he says. “Are you the prosecuting attorney or my mother? Because if you’re my mother I guess I’ll have to answer you,” he says. — So what? Why does he have to answer every single one of our questions about this? Why can’t he be a grouch? Maybe it’s irresponsible and maybe it’s even dumb, but it’s hardly proof that he’s lying. Maybe he’s posting drunk, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a kernel of truth in all this. Maybe he got his facts out of order. Maybe the editor(s) in question lied to him. Only one is claiming it came from their attorney general somehow, after all, and maybe they’re getting their facts wrong, and there was never a letter from Ashcroft at all. Wouldn’t be the first time some cowboy went after the funnybooks for perfectly stupid reasons. —But cowboys want noise, bright lights, big rooms full of an adoring public grimly celebrating another hard-fought kulturkrieg. You don’t get noise and lights and big rooms with a quiet request to back down to “vagina” from “cunt.” Doesn’t make for good headlines. You know?
1994: Michael Diana used to do an underground comic called Boiled Angel. In 1990, someone rather brutally killed five women in Gainesville, Florida, on and around the University of Florida campus. Solely on the basis of the story and art in Boiled Angel no. 6, investigators decided Diana was a plausible suspect. The cops later picked up the real murderer when he tried to rob a Winn Dixie. —In 1993, a state attorney going through the old case files stumbled over more issues of Boiled Angel and decided Diana’s stuff was obscene; Diana had to be stopped. A jury determined that Boiled Angel had no literary or artistic merit. The terms of Diana’s three-year probation allowed his house to be searched at any time without warning or warrant for evidence that he either possessed or was creating obscene material. Psychological testing was mandated. He paid a fine of $3,000. And he was allowed no contact at all with anyone under the age of 18. (A prohibition against his drawing anything at all was later dropped.)
“Hi, this is Kevin. I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Um, hi. This is Kip Manley again. I left you some voicemail yesterday? I’m just trying to confirm this, uh, this claim that there might be a letter, from Attorney General John Ashcroft, directing states to look into, um, cleaning up or even, I guess, censoring comic strips in newspapers. This cartoonist says his editor told him he was told by somebody that this was the case, and, um. Anyway. You can reach me at my work number, during the day, or at home, in the evenings. Um. Thanks.”
Reaction was swift (and furious): there was the Fuck Asscroft brigade, of course, and the Comics Journal thread was locked down after an avalanche of what can best be described as juvenalia. Comixpedia assured webcartoonists everywhere that the FCC had no power to regulate content on the internet, and thank God for that. Scott Kurtz did some homework, and ended up throwing up his hands. —But running through a lot of it was a contrapuntal strain: gee, I dunno, I mean, I hate Ashcroft as much as the next person, but that word, y’know, “cunt,” in a comic strip? I can’t believe anybody would try to get away with it in the first place. I mean, what about the children?
Keeping in mind that Maakies appears in the sort of alternaweekly newspapers that run features on trends in group sex at local swingers’ clubs. Where on earth do these “children” come into this?
1999: Jesus Castillo sells a copy of Demon Beast Invasion to an undercover cop in Dallas, Texas. He is, of course, convicted on obscenity charges. —Leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not the CBLDF was rather staggeringly incompetent in their defense of Castillo, and leave aside for the moment whether or not the comic in question is or is not obscene, misogynistic crap, and leave aside for the moment whether or not it was the height of folly for Susan Napier to defend Demon Beast Invasion as filled with symbolism and political themes—literary and artistic merit that justified its pornographic excess. After all, the prosecution did:
I don’t care what kind of testimony is out there. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids.
What kids? Where?
Looks like somebody didn’t get the memo.
“Mercury.”
“Um, hi. Who’s your comics editor?”
“Our art director is Jen Davison.”
“So she’s responsible for the content of your comics?”
“Yeah. Well, she picks them out.”
“Is she available?”
“She’s on vacation.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks.”
Oh, hey, check it out! Tony Millionaire put the word “boner” in Maakies and 23 newspapers dropped him!
—He said, on April Fool’s. Oh, and he said some more, too:
posted April 01, 2004 08:41 PM
I only wish it was a good joke…
but I got a lot of mileage out of it. two weeks and a hundred bloggers.
blog…..
....sounds like a turd coming out of an ass….
Ha ha. Oh, that Tony Millionaire. Posting drunk. —And was this spectacularly stupid, then, and grossly irresponsible? I dunno. How many more people were prompted to look at Maakies again, or for the first time? How many more Uncle Gabby statues did he sell? How much respect did he lose? (How much did he have in the first place?) Does he owe anything, anything at all, to the larger idea of comics as a struggling medium? Should he go around insulting the legacies of Michael Kennedy and John Hunter, Mike Diana and Jesus Castillo like that? —Sorry. Tried to keep a straight face. Look. It’s not like I’m going to revile the name of Tony Millionaire now. It’s not like I’m going to throw the paper across the room rather than read Maakies ever again. It’s a great strip and he’s a great cartoonist and that’s all I want or expect from him, you know? It’s not like one false cry of wolf! is going to make us all pack up our gear and leave the kultur undefended: there’s plenty of wolves out there yet, and there are plenty of crusaders out there. This is comics we’re talking about, after all.
But, man, Tony. I woulda stuck with “cunt.” Short, pithy Anglo-Saxonisms are always funnier.
PS— Confidential to Michele: Calvin Klein boxer briefs, actually, which don’t tend to wad up in a bunch. But thanks for the concern—and the traffic.
PPS— Oh, hey, I finally heard back just now from Kevin at Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection. “I haven’t turned up a thing,” he says. “But let me tell you: we’ve gotten weirder things from the Department of Justice.”
“Yeah,” says I, “I just found out for sure it was a prank myself. But it sure sounded plausible.”
“Oh,” he says. “It sounds very plausible.”
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I'm a big fan of men in boxer briefs.
I would still pay honest American dollars for a Free Drinky Crow t-shirt.