Drinky Crow on Adult Swim

(Source: www.icv2.com)

Hide the booze and lock up your tug boats: The Drinky Crow Show is coming to Adult Swim.

Tony Millionaire and Eric Kaplan have made several 11-minute episodes based on Millionaire's long-running comic strip Maakies. The Drinky Crow Show will start airing on The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block on Sunday, May 13th.

Adult Swim has become the Cartoon Network's test bed for domestically produced animated shows, trying out unusual fare such as Japanese anime Crayon Shin-Chan.

Millionaire started writing the dark comic Maakies for the New York Press back in 1994. He based the strip around two anti-heroic characters: Uncle Gabby, a drunken Irish monkey, and Drinky Crow, an alcoholic bird. These two characters work on a tugboat and share tendencies towards booze (natch), violence, suicide and venereal disease.

Millionaire once described the strip as, "Maakies is me spilling my guts . . . Writing and drawing about all the things that make me want to jump in the river, laughing at the horror of being alive."

Eric Kaplan is best known for his work on such shows as Futurama, The David Letterman Show and Andy Richter Controls the Universe.

This isn't the first time an animated adaptation of Maakies has hit the airwaves. Several short Flash animations appeared on Saturday Night Live during the 1990's and were collected (along with many never-aired episodes) on the Bright Red Rocket DVD God Hates Cartoons.

An animated Maakies short also appeared on a 2002 documentary about 80's college-rock band They Might Be Giants, called Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns.

Billy West (Futurama) will provide the voice of Drinky Crow.

Fun Fact(s): There's a great deal of secrecy why Tony Millionaire titled his comic strip Maakies. One interpretation is that it's the name of Uncle Gabby's employer, the captain of the tugboat that appears in nearly every strip.

"I can't release that information until a certain person dies," he said another time. "Because he or she would be extremely pissed off to even know that that name was being used."

At other times, Millionaire has attributed the name to his friend Spike Vrusho. "Some of the tugboats in New York harbor have a big M painted on the side of them and my friend Spike Vrusho used to say "MAAKIES!" in a high pitched screech every time he saw one."

Either way, Millionaire admits that he came up with the name Maakies well before he decided what the protagonist of the comic strip would be.

Another possible reason: 'Måke' (English spelling 'maake') is the Norwegian word for 'seagull.'

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