Word: socked
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...There's something enigmatic about the series; you never know what to make of "Sock Monkey." Is it for kids? Is it satire? Is it sincere? Is it a metaphor? Is it meant to be funny? Once you accept the answer to all these questions is "yes and no," you can enjoy the head-space it puts...
Tony Millionaire's "Sock Monkey" disturbs me for all the right reasons. It's like a children's book, sort of, but I would never give it to a child on the very slight chance that it would cause them to go "wrong." Sporadically published (by Dark Horse), the sixth issue came out last month. It should be sought out by all fans of the delicately perverse...
Like a lot of children's literature, these stories - sometimes spanning two issues - feature beloved objects that have come to life. The titular sock-monkey, named Uncle Gabby, and Mr. Crow, a cloth crow with button eyes, get into adventures by innocently imitating the adult world. The stories read like original Grimm's fairy tales - the ones where Cinderella's stepsisters hack away at their feet with an ax so they will fit the glass slipper. They have a romantic, quaint naïveté mixed with moments of modern existential horror...
...weren't for the schadenfreude you expect with each turn of the page, the pictures would be called "charming." Millionaire once made his living as an architectural artist, sketching people's houses. In fact, much of "Sock Monkey" involves a love of still-lives, usually including Victorian-era ephemera. The panels are often extra-large to accommodate these precise black-and-white drawings, which have the quality of etchings...
...partly this drafting skill and design sense that make it hard to dismiss "Sock Monkey" as something pointlessly ironic. The other part is Millionaire's talent for language. Characters have a strange, arched sort of "voice," unlike any I've experienced. At one point Mr. Crow says, "Why is it that I am the only bird on the American scene who cannot fly?" It's that "on the American scene" that gets me. Such stylings have a stilted delicacy that perfectly matches...