The Forgotten SCREW Cover Art of Tony Millionaire, Part Two: Issue #1,312, or "Holy Cow, That's Creepy!"

Part Two of our long, reluctant march through the forgotten SCREW cover art of Tony Millionaire brings us within view of SCREW #1,312, dated April 25, 1994. 

Compare this cover with the one from my previous post, (SCREW #1,416) and a common theme begins to emerge, one that we'll see Tony Millionaire obsessively explore in nearly all of his SCREW outings: sexuality in the animal kingdom. This is risky territory, given SCREW Magazine's policy forbidding the depiction of human/animal relations, but Tony Millionaire is not the type to let rules or community standards stifle the exorcism of his personal demons.

In this instance, we see Millionaire's familiar Maakies characters, (Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby) stumbling upon some divine, bovine incarnation of fecundity. The crow and the monkey seem delighted at the prospect of gorging themselves at the overfilled teats of this fantastic figure of farmland fertility. 

It's an amusingly silly image, but what deeper statement is Millionaire reaching for in this picture? Does he ask us to ponder the dark nature of our own bestial procreative drives by blurring the line between human and animal sexuality? Or is Millionaire attempting to tap into that niche contingent of comics fans who become excited at the sight of a nude human female body topped by a cartoon animal head? Is Millionaire himself a pioneer in the furry fandom movement? 

In this drawing, (as with his other covers) I have difficulty grasping Tony Millionaire's true intent, but one thing is clear to me: this is no way to sell stroke mags.

The Forgotten SCREW Cover Art of Tony Millionaire

MAAKIES cartoonist Tony Millionaire has been giving me shit over some mildly risque designs I drew recently for BROKEN SKATEBOARDS, (available for purchase here: http://brokenskateboards.nl/products/ ) so I thought I'd dig deep into my archives in order to spend the next few weeks exploring the forgotten SCREW cover art of Tony Millionaire.

Known to today's readers primarily as a children's author, few would suspect that the avuncular creator of wholesome properties like BILLY HAZELNUTS and TONY MILLIONAIRE'S SOCK MONKEY™ was in earlier decades impoverished enough to turn up, hat-in-hand at the door of  at 116 West 14th Street in NYC, address of the World's Greatest Newspaper? Truly those must've been dark times.

Millionaire's SCREW cover drawings, while in no way erotic, are interesting nonetheless for the peek they offer into what is clearly a uniquely disturbed imagination. Let's begin our exploration with SCREW #1,416, dated April 22nd, 1996: the cover drawing shows a creature, (most likely an ape) dressed in human clothing, preparing to reap a harvest of what are apparently human breasts, while a nude woman watches angrily from a perch in a nearby tree.

This unsettling image leaves the viewer with a multitude of questions: what does the simian gardener plan to do with his vegetables post-harvest? Is he engaged in some evil experiment involving genetically-altered crops? Why is the nude woman displeased? Is she the monkey's spouse, and if so, is she jealous of the attention being showered on this garden of human breasts? Why would a woman be married to a monkey, and more importantly, how did this cover drawing, laden with implications of bestiality, slip past SCREW's guidelines banning any depiction of human/animal relationships?

Perhaps its best not to ponder the meaning of this drawing too long. I fear that in this case, the search for understanding will send the viewer down a twisting tunnel that leads to confusion, despair, and ultimately madness. More Millionaire next week!

Cover Art for SCREW #1063, featuring cover artist Jim "Hak" Hopkins

By the early 1980s, the path that led cartoonists from Manhattan's School of Visual Arts to SCREW Magazine had been well-established. Kevin Hein, who in his SVA days assisted Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly at RAW, later sought full-time work in SCREW's art department, and eventually found himself sitting in the art director's chair. Many of Hein's SVA classmates sold art to SCREW, including Kaz, Drew Friedman, Peter Bagge, and a fellow named Jim Hopkins, who drew for SCREW under the pseudonym "HAK."

Jim Hopkins contributed many covers and comic strips to SCREW during Kevin Hein's tenure as art director. I've always considered Jim to be one of the most talented folks ever to grace the cover of the notorious smut tabloid. Issue #1063 features what might be the best of all the "HAK" covers, this one starring revolutionary stand-up comic Lenny Bruce. Sadly, I managed to save only the cover of #1063, but I believe this gorgeous drawing was accompanied by "Shpritz to Lenny," a touching three-page tribute strip which Jim was kind enough to allow me to reprint in my anthology LEGAL ACTION COMICS Vol. 1 in 2000.

A quick Google search has lead me to this blog, and this blog,
both of which feature what appears to be current work by Jim (no longer known as "HAK") Hopkins, now a veteran of the storyboard scene. From what I can see, Jim's stuff has gotten even more accomplished and beautiful than when I last saw it over a decade ago, (if that's possible).

SCREW #1063 is dated July 17, 1989. Scanning and color-correcting these old, moldering sheets of newsprint is always challenging, but doing justice to this drawing was especially tricky, given the subtlety of Hopkins' technique. My guess is that Jim started off with a B&W image drawn in either china marker or pastel. For his color seps, it appears that Jim did two overlays, ALSO in pastel or china marker, for his yellow and cyan plates. It's a lushly nuanced drawing that deserves better quality paper and a more sophisticated printing press than it got.

David Aaron Clark: 1960 - 2009

I knew Dave Clark when he was an editor at SCREW, which would've been from early in 1990 to sometime in 1995 or 1996, (I'm navigating from memory here, so my dates may be a bit off). I thought he was a talented writer, he thought I was a talented cartoonist, and we shared a lot of common interests, so we hit it off almost immediately after we first met.

The aspect of Dave's personality that I remember most clearly is that he was incredibly witty, perhaps the wittiest person I've ever known. He often said things that were devastatingly funny, he had a comedian's sense of timing, and he knew how to put you in your place gently but firmly whenever the situation required it. He was also a voracious consumer of alternative culture. If you'd just discovered something weird and fascinating, the chances were pretty good that Dave already knew about it, and had moved on to something even weirder and more obscure. This was a very hip guy.

During the five years I knew him, Dave Clark underwent something of a metamorphosis. When we first met, he appeared to me to be a shy, smarter-than-average nerd, someone who wouldn't look out of place at a comic book convention. Before too long, Clark had reinvented himself as a tattooed, black leather clad denizen of the underworld, with a personal life so edgy, so tumultuous, his misadventures occasionally made the papers.

Around 1995 or 1996, Dave left his SCREW gig to relocate to the West Coast, and I lost touch with him. We had a few friends in common, from whom I learned that Clark was now directing artsy porn videos in LA. Only in this last year did I finally manage to reconnect with him on Facebook, where I was delighted to exchange a few quips with my old friend.

Dave Clark's appetites signaled that he was unlikely ever to occupy an old age home, yet I was shocked and saddened to learn that we lost him on November 28th, 2009, one year shy of Fifty. Filmmaker Charles Pinion, (a former SCREW staffer and close friend of Clark's) tells me the cause of death was a "pulmonary embolism." Whatever that is, I hope it was quick and relatively painless.

More than a few SCREW cover concepts were fed to me by the always-imaginative Clark, (including the Coffin Joe cover I posted on June 26th at Dave's request). I may post more of those later, but what I'd like to post now are two SCREW covers I drew in the early 1990s that featured likenesses of Dave Clark.

The first is an Easter cover dated April 16th, 1990. The idea here, (and I can't remember who came up with this idea) was to show Christ at the Last Supper, with SCREW's editorial staff cast in the roles of the Twelve Apostles, (although I only count nine apostles in this drawing). The folks depicted in this drawing are, left to right: (top row) Managing Editor Manny Neuhaus, Lennie Mace, publisher Al Goldstein, JC, John Walsh, David Aaron Clark, Charles Pinion, (bottom row) Art Director Kevin Hein, Keri Rosebraugh, and Cheryl Giordano.




The second cover, dated February 24, 1992, recreates an evening I spent accompanying Dave and SCREW Editor Eric Danville on their mission to a strip club in Rego Park, Queens, where we watched a porn starlet dance, (inadequate porn scholar that I am, I can't remember this gal's name). Clark and Danville are shown at the lower left, (the rest of the audience members are imaginary miscreants).

*ADDENDUM: the more-than-adequate porn scholar Eric Danville informs me that the dancing starlet in this drawing is none other than Madison. Upon viewing this illo, those of you who are familiar with Madison may exclaim, "that doesn't look like Madison!" In my defense, I will say that in 1992, as a newcomer to the ways of caricature, my efforts in this area could be counted on to fail as often as they succeeded. It is with deep humility that I now offer to Madison, (and to Mr. Danville, who some of you know to be far cuter than he appears in this drawing) my sincerest apologies.




Rest in peace, Dave.

Cover Art for SCREW #1024, featuring cover artist Robert Crumb

What can I say about Robert Crumb? He invented underground comix, and after forty years, he remains the towering figure in that scene. His is a household name, spoken reverently by cartoonists and aging hippies, but also familiar to many who've never seen one of his comic books, (thanks largely to filmmaker Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary).

The first time I remember seeing a Crumb drawing was when I was six or seven. During a walk down Jackson Heights' commercial drag 82nd Street, I spied Crumb's unforgettable "Stoned Agin" poster in the window of a head shop. The classic poster's fascinating, frightening sequence of images stuck with me. Growing up in the Seventies, one couldn't help but catch glimpses of Crumb's work here and there out of the corner of one's eye, whether it was a "Keep On Truckin'" sticker speeding away on the bumper of a VW Beetle, or the wonderful, short-lived Mr. Natural Strip that Crumb drew for the Village Voice. Like his less-interesting contemporary Peter Max, R. Crumb contributed an essential component to that decade's esthetic; something floating in the air that inevitably seeped into everyone's skulls.

It was in the early 1980s, (my High School years) when I really jumped into Crumb's work with both feet. I started with all the issues of ZAP and ARCADE I could lay my hands on at Forbidden Planet, SoHo Zat, and other long-forgotten Downtown Manhattan comics shops. When I exhausted the local supply, I was forced to seek out overseas sources, namely the excellent hardbound Crumb sketchbooks published in 1981 by German imprint Zweitausendeins.

Needless to say, I'm a hopeless Crumb fiend. and I'm sure that I speak for most cartoonists when I say that Crumb's work changed the way I thought about comics. Like some powerful hallucinogen, Crumb's comics stripped away the cornball conventions we'd acquired while reading mainstream comics, leaving the doors of perception squeaky-clean and wide open to....what?

Let's leave that question mark dangling while we skip forward a few years to 1988. Al Goldstein visited R. Crumb at his home in Encinitas, CA to interview the cartoonist for SCREW's notorious leased access cable TV series Midnight Blue. A transcript of the Crumb Q&A transcript ran in two or three issues of SCREW, and Crumb supplied drawings for the covers of those issues.

Famous for turning down high-paying illustration gigs out of some fear of "selling out," Crumb certainly couldn't have been tempted by the pay SCREW was offering for covers in those days, (I think it was $200 for cover art at that point?). More likely, Crumb saw Goldstein as a kindred soul, another grizzled survivor of the Sixties' underground hippie papers.

This issue is dated October 17, 1988. To the best of my knowledge, there are three SCREW covers with art by Robert Crumb. One is a detailed close-up portrait of Goldstein, (commissioned by Al himself, of course). The other two would appear to be drawings pulled from Crumb's sketchbooks, and #1024 is one of those. I'm not sure who did the color separations for this one. It may have been Crumb, (who certainly knew his way around a color sep), but more likely, it was someone in SCREW's art department, (I say this because in a few months, I would be tapped to provide color seps for another Crumb cover).

For those of you who started drooling at the thought that there's a Goldstein/Crumb interview out there somewhere in videoland, you can find it right here at William Lustig's Blue Underground, (box art by yours truly).

Cover Art for SCREW #1026, featuring cover artist Robert Schneck

Here's a scan of SCREW #1026, with a cover drawing by frequent contributor Robert Schneck. A talented, versatile illustrator, Schneck drew LOTS of excellent SCREW covers in the late '80's and throughout the '90's, (making him a contemporary of mine). Unfortunately, he blipped off of art director Kevin Hein's radar as we entered the Twenty First Century, and as a result, we are deprived of any Robert Schneck SCREW covers during the paper's Hindenburg-esque death-dive.

I wish I had more information to offer about Robert Schneck the illustrator. A few minutes spent on Google provides me with plenty of info on Robert Schneck the writer on paranormal subjects, and photos of Robert Schneck the writer look like they COULD be the fellow I remember meeting once or twice in SCREW's art department. Then again, they might NOT be the same person, in which case I'd hate to heap slander upon this innocent writer by accusing him of drawing cartoons for a filthy magazine. Perhaps in time, mysterious figures will emerge from the hollow Earth to shed some much-needed ethereal light upon this mystery...?

For the moment, let's just say that Robert Schneck drew some damned fine SCREW covers. I'm not sure how many of them found their way into my archives, but here's a good one. It's SCREW's twentieth anniversary cover, and it features a dead-on likeness of publisher Al Goldstein in the role of a blind newsdealer hawking a braille edition of SCREW, (a porn mag for the blind? That's actually funny!). Schneck, who typically made SCREW's limited color palette sing, gives us a fairly restrained color separation this time around, using pure blue and red nearly everywhere except on Goldstein himself. The issue date is October 31, 1988.

Cover Art for SCREW #506, featuring cover artist Spain Rodriguez

Spain Rodriguez has been one of my all-time underground comix faves since I picked up my first ZAP Comix reprint in the very early 80s. Whether it's his iconic antihero Trashman, his femme fatale Big Bitch, his excellent historical pieces, or his autobiographical coming-of-age motorcycle gang tales, I'm always happy to sit down and spend some time with a Spain strip.

Besides being one of the founding fathers of Underground Comix, Spain was also standing in the delivery room when the East Village Other and similar 1960s hippie papers were born. As you may already know, that's the same grimy gene pool from which SCREW first crawled in 1968. I imagine that Spain began contributing art to SCREW pretty early in the paper's run, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are many more Spain SCREW covers than are collected in my insufficient archive.

Here's a nice Spain SCREW cover from November 1978, featuring a subtle flash on a NYC subway car. Spain turned in some of the most stupefyingly complex color separations I've ever seen, but this one is fairly simple. It's a strong cover, one of many from Spain Rodriguez that I hope to post in the weeks to come.