| Eric Monster Millikin | |
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Eric Monster Millikin's comics often explore themes of the occult and romance. |
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| Author(s) | Eric Monster Millikin; sometimes with artist Casey Sorrow |
| Website | http://www.ericmillikin.com/ |
| Current status / schedule | Weekly |
| Launch date | Fall 1995 |
| Genre(s) | Horror, Comedy, Romance, Political |
Eric Millikin, also known as Eric Monster Millikin, is an award-winning American artist and former human anatomy lab embalmer and dissectionist.[1][2] He is known for his pioneering work in Internet art and webcomics, and for his controversial semi-autobiographical artwork with political, romantic and horror themes.
Millikin began posting comics and art on the internet using CompuServe in the 1980s, and began publishing on the World Wide Web as early as the fall of 1995.[3][4] His artwork has also been published in books, serialized in newspapers, and displayed in art museums. The themes of Millikin's art generally involve his use of the occult as an artist, in romantic relationships with ghosts and vampires, and in conflicts with various zombies, demons, aliens, and monsters. The artwork is mixed media, often combining expressionist paintings with found objects. Millikin's works often have political themes, and the text is sometimes written in free verse. From 2000-2008 the comic was titled Fetus-X after one of the recurring characters.
Millikin is one of the few, and first, webcomic creators successful enough to make a living as an artist.[5] He often collaborates with artist Casey Sorrow.
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Millikin's artwork is characterized by brilliantly colored paint brushed and smeared into swirls and spirals.[6][7][8] His large-scale artwork takes full advantage of the internet's formal possibilities, and has incorporated animation and winding "infinite canvas" designs,[2] going beyond the limited sizes and shapes of conventional printed pages.[9] The American Library Association's Booklist describes how Millikin's visual style "crosses Edvard Munch with an incipient victim of high-school suicide." [10] Millikin's works range from those made almost completely of text (for example "My Little Brother," a first-person tale from the perspective of one conjoined twin in a love triangle)[11] to those that are completely wordless or even abstract. Millikin's artwork is given by Scott McCloud as an example of using the web to create "an explosion of diverse genres and styles"[12] and is described as "mind-blowing" by Comic Book Resources.[13]
Two major recurring themes of Eric Millikin's art are him falling prey to tragic death and him engaging in star-crossed love affairs. For example, he is depicted engaged in activities such as being killed by vampire hunters, being eaten by a dinosaur, and sawing off his own arm then replacing it with a zombie's.[14] His main love interest is Inga, Princess of Vampires, and he also depicts himself trying to bring Alicia, a fork-throwing poltergeist cheerleader and his former girlfriend, back from the dead. He is often depicted accompanied by other supernatural creatures, like Fetus-X, a psychic zombie fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde who may or may not be Millikin's missing Siamese twin or his clone from an alternate timeline or dimension.[15]
Millikin began drawing horror comics by age one-and-a-half, when he made crayon drawings of ghosts terrorizing him during toilet-training. By second grade, he was making teachers profane birthday cards showing his school burning down. [16] As a youth, he was influenced by 1980s X-Men and Far Side comics and the video game Gorf.[17] When he was in elementary school in 1985, Millikin began posting his unauthorized Wizard of Oz parody comic Witches and Stitches on Compuserve.[18] Publishing on Compuserve allowed Millikin to self-publish, avoiding censorship.[19] Witches and Stitches was popular with audiences around the world and inspired many artists to create their own webcomics.[20] Copies of Witches and Stitches are now often difficult to find because Millikin was threatened with a lawsuit over the comic.[21]
Millikin attended art school at Michigan State University in their Honors College.[17] He paid his way through school by working in MSU's human anatomy lab dissecting human cadavers.[2]
Eric Millikin has published webcomics since the fall of 1995.[4] In the fall of 2002, his comics were published as part of the online alternative comics anthology Serializer[22] and in October 2006 he became the editor of Serializer.[23][24] Under Millikin's editorship Serializer has published his own comics as well as others like A Softer World, Idiot Box, and Templar, Arizona.[25] The Sunday Times describes the work on serializer as "high-art", and the Sydney Morning Herald considers them to be the avant-garde.[26][27]
Millikin has also been published by the webcomics sites Modern Tales and Webcomics Nation.[28] His comics are one of the all-time most popular on Webcomics Nation.[29]
In his book Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists, syndicated newspaper editorial cartoonist Ted Rall describes Millikin's work as "one of the most interesting webcomics around."[30] The Webcomics Examiner named Millikin's comics one of the best webcomics,[31] the webcomics blog ComixTalk named it one of the 100 Greatest Webcomics of all time,[32] and The Washington Post's readers named it one of the top 10 finalists for Best Webcomic of the Past Decade in 2010.[33] It has also been nominated for multiple Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, including their top honor of "Outstanding Comic". Millikin has been a panelist and guest at webcomic conventions, including the inaugural New England Webcomics Weekend, the first convention organized by and focusing on webcomic creators.[34][35]
By spring 2000 Millikin was working with artist Casey Sorrow and creating the comics for college newspapers like Michigan State University's The State News. Almost immediately there were problems with censorship, Catholic League protests, and threatened cancellation. After six months, The State News cancelled the comic strip despite support from some readers.[36] Millikin's artwork continues to be published on the web and in many college newspapers, in alternative newspapers such as the Metro Times,[37] in major daily newspapers like The Detroit News[38] and Detroit Free Press, [39] and in magazines like Wired. [40] The Comics Journal has written that Millikin's comics "use the newspaper format for far more daring, entertainingly perverse work" than most comics and is "perfectly at home at a good alternative weekly or a great college paper." [41]
Millikin's artwork is often shown in galleries and museums. He is one of the artists in the "Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics" art exhibition which has travelled to the Krannert Art Museum and The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar.,[42] and in the "Monsters of Webcomics Virtual Gallery" at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum.[43] His artwork was included, along with Marilyn Manson and HR Giger's, in the international horror art collection "DAMNED."[44]
Millikin is known for his political and social activism, with his artwork often tackling controversial issues. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, his comics championed Barack Obama and ridiculed John McCain. The Webcomics Examiner has called Millikin's work "one of the sharpest political commentaries available. In [the George W. Bush] era where presidents are treated as messiahs, and questioning the fatherland’s foreign policies is socially unacceptable, Eric shows how necessary it is to yell at the top of your lungs about the madness of it all."[31]
Millikin has also used his artwork to raise money for causes like helping Hurricane Katrina victims,[45] fight diseases like muscular dystrophy,[46] and grant wishes to terminally ill children through the Make-A-Wish Foundation.[47]
Millikin's artwork has won many awards from organizations including the Associated Press,[39] Society of Professional Journalists,[48] Investigative Reporters and Editors[49] and the Society for News Design.[50] In 2009, his illustrations were part of the Detroit Free Press's Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Mayor in Crisis" series, which used the secret text messages of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to reveal the mayor's perjury and obstruction of justice in a police whistle-blower trial. The series resulted in Mayor Kilpatrick being sent to jail.[49][51]
His front-page artwork in the Detroit Free Press advocating for U.S. government loans as a solution to the automotive industry crisis of 2008–2009 was described as a "gutsy move" that "stretch[es] the limits of the medium"[50] and CNN's Kyra Phillips described it as "full front page and in your face".[52] Congressman John D. Dingell displayed it on the House floor urging passage of government loans to automakers and reiterated the central theme of the piece, saying "now is the time for us to 'Invest in America'."[53]
Millikin's October 2011 Wizard of Oz-themed Detroit Free Press front-page "Lions, Tigers and Bears: Oh my!" illustration (about the Detroit Lions, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Bears) was praised by ESPN's Mike Tirico during the the Monday Night Football half time show.[54]
However, not all criticism of Millikin's artwork has been positive. Since 2000, Millikin has been the target of protest campaigns organized by the Catholic League for what they call his "blasphemous treatment of Jesus".[55] “This particular comic is offensive to Catholics and Christians,” Catholic League spokesman Patrick Scully said in August 2002. “It completely ridicules the Catholic faith and is not funny.” [36] The Hartford Advocate has called Millikin a "borderline sociopath."[56]
In 2000, Eric Millikin and his frequent collaborator Casey Sorrow created the holiday Monkey Day (celebrated December 14) as an opportunity to educate the public about monkeys, as a holiday that supports evolution rather than religious themes, and an excuse to throw monkey-themed costume parties.[57][58]