The 'Arts and Leisure' section of Sunday's New York Times includes a lengthy front page article by Charles McGrath about cartoonist Tony Millionaire and his creation Drinky Crow, which debuted in animated form Sunday night on the Cartoon Network.  McGrath establishes Tony Millionaire's Adult Swim crazed creator 'cred' with an introductory anecdote about the Mr. Millionaire (formerly known as 'Scott Richardson') going all 'American Pie' on a slice of pizza during a drunken night in the 90s, and then follows up with a description of the 'highlights' of the first episode of the new Drinky Crow cartoon, which 'begins with a whoosh of crow vomit and ends with a squirt of bug excrement,' and also includes 'floggings, decapitations and dismemberments' as well as whale copulation and a fly attempting to mate with a cockroach.  While the foregoing may appear to those who don't watch Adult Swim's Sunday night 'tryout' sessions as 'outre' enough for anyone, the animated Drinky Crow, which had its original TV debut on Saturday Night Live in the late 1990s, appeared almost elegant when compared with some of its even more ribald competition.

While there is no guarantee that the Cartoon Network will order additional episodes of Drinky Crow, the bibulous bird appears to have the inside track on further Adult Swim exposure via a process Mr. McGrath describes as 'in part mystical and in part based on viewer response.'  So far Mr. Millionaire's blotto blackbird is far ahead of its competition in an Internet poll (38% to 22%).  It also appears that the show has a champion in Nick Weidenfield, Adult Swim's manager of program development, and Tony Millionaire's The Maakies comic strip has plenty of admirers as well including Art Spiegelman, who McGrath quotes as loving 'the disparity between the (strip's) delicacy of the drawing and the coarseness and stupidity of the humor.'