Wadpaw in Maakies!

In my ongoing attempts to dominate all media, I am proud to announce that I have succeeded in landing a gag in world-class cartoonist Tony Millionaire’s Maakies.

How, the reader may ask, does one accomplish this feat?

It probably helps if you know Tony, whom I met through a number of acquaintances, including

  and Snake n Bacon creator Michael Kupperman (if you don’t know Snake n Bacon, you will — it, along with the Maakies-derived Drinky Crow Show, is set to become yet another [adult swim] show starring the voice of

 ).

I was nodding acquaintances foryears with Tony before I discovered his “for kids” comic book Sock Monkey. At the time I was riding high off my kids’ movie success Antz and all anyone in Hollywood wanted to know from me was what kind of kids’ movie I wanted to write next. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I advise you to get thee hence to your nearest Sock Monkey collection — the stories are sweet, tender, funny, weird, scary and painfully well-rendered. I immediately saw the commercial potential of a Sock Monkey movie, saw it as a kind of 19th-century Toy Story, contacted Tony and put together a full treatment. Tony and I and an enthusiastic young Canadian director toured all the studios and gave the pitch our best efforts, but Hollywood somehow did not “get” Sock Monkey and we all went our separate ways.

Since then, every now and then I will get an email from Tony saying something like “Quick! My strip is due in six hours and I need an idea!” Not a natural gag writer, I will respond to these emails with some meticulously worked-out concept that sounds great to me but is completely wrong for Maakies. The other day I woke up to find another one of these emails in the inbox and this time took a different tack: I simply thought of the most horrible, saddest, most pathetic examples of bodily harm that could befall a creature, and then tried to think of a gag to work around it. Prolapsed intestines, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, vehicular manslaughter, crablice — and the idea above.