Eric Millikin

Eric Millikin is an American contemporary artist and activist based in Detroit, Michigan. He is known for his pioneering work in Internet art, Postinternet art, and webcomics, as well as AI art, augmented and virtual reality art, video art, conceptual art, poetry, performance art and body art, including "artistic drinking projects." His work is often controversial and semi-autobiographical, with political, romantic, occult, horror and black comedy themes. Awards for Millikin's artwork include the Pulitzer Prize.
Together, Millikin and Casey Sorrow created and popularized the international animal rights holiday World Monkey Day.
Life and work.
Millikin began drawing horror comics by age one-and-a-half, and by second grade, he was making teachers profane birthday cards showing his school burning down. As a youth, he was influenced by 1980s X-Men and "Far Side" comics and the video game "Gorf". 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.
Millikin attended art school at Michigan State University in their Honors College. He paid his way through school by working in the school's human anatomy lab as an embalmer and dissectionist of human cadavers. While at art school, Millikin was homeless and lived in a Buick LeSabre. He is a 2021 Master of Fine Arts candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
In 2002, Millikin was an editor (along with Tom Hart) and contributing artist of the online alternative comics anthology Serializer. In 2005, Millikin was one of the artists in the Clickwheel collective that published on the video iPod. Millikin has also been published by Modern Tales and Webcomics Nation, where he was one of the all-time most popular artists. Millikin is one of the few, and first, webcomic creators successful enough to make a living as an artist.
He is also known as Eric Monster Millikin.
Notable artworks.
Millikin's art often includes self-portraits as well as portraits of celebrities and political figures. His work often incorporates mixed media and found objects, such as packages of candy, paper currency, and spiders. His large-scale artwork takes full advantage of the internet's formal possibilities, and has incorporated animation and winding "infinite canvas" designs, going beyond the limited sizes and shapes of conventional printed pages. Millikin's works range from those made almost completely of text (including calligraphy, typography, anagrams, ambigrams, free verse, and cut-up technique poetry) to those that are optical illusions or completely abstract. Millikin's artwork has been published in books, serialized in newspapers, and displayed in art museums.
Exhibitions and publications.
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, and in the "Monsters of Webcomics Virtual Gallery" at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum. His artwork was included, along with Marilyn Manson and HR Giger's, in the international horror art collection "DAMNED."
Millikin also distributes his artwork through college newspapers, in alternative newspapers such as the "Metro Times", and in magazines like "Wired". His work is also published in major daily newspapers like "The Detroit News", "Detroit Free Press", "The Courier-Journal", "The Des Moines Register", "The Tennessean" and "USA Today".
Activism.
Millikin is known for his political and social activism, with his artwork often tackling controversial issues. He has championed Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as "Obamacare". Millikin has also championed green energy, ridiculing the "Drill, Baby, Drill Brigade" of "oil producers, free-market zealots and global warming deniers." 
Millikin has also used his artwork to raise money for causes like helping Hurricane Katrina victims, fighting diseases like muscular dystrophy, and granting wishes to terminally ill children through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He has also created posters campaigning to raise money for programs to improve adult literacy, auctioned artwork to support soup kitchen efforts to feed the hungry, and created artwork to help people in the city of Flint who had lead-contaminated water during the Flint water crisis.
Critical reaction.
The American Library Association's "Booklist" describes how Millikin's expressionistic visual style "crosses Edvard Munch with an incipient victim of high-school suicide" and "The Hindu" describes his paintings as "haunting images." In his book "," syndicated newspaper editorial cartoonist Ted Rall describes Millikin's work as "one of the most interesting webcomics around." "The Webcomics Examiner" named Millikin's comics one of the best webcomics, the webcomics blog ComixTalk named it one of the 100 Greatest Webcomics of all time, and "The Washington Post"s readers named it one of the top 10 finalists for Best Webcomic of the Past Decade in 2010. Millikin's work has also been nominated for multiple Web Cartoonists' 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. The "Sunday Times" described serializer as "high-art", and the "Sydney Morning Herald" considered them to be the avant-garde.
Millikin's artwork is given by Scott McCloud as an example of using the web to create "an explosion of diverse genres and styles" and is described as "mind-blowing" by Comic Book Resources. "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." "The Webcomics Examiner" has called Millikin's work "one of the sharpest political commentaries available."
Millikin's artwork has won many awards from organizations including the Associated Press, Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, National Association of Black Journalists, and the Society for News Design. In 2008 his illustrations were part of the series "A Mayor in Crisis", wherein the "Detroit Free Press" covered, or uncovered, 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 Kilpatrick's being sent to jail and in the newspaper's 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
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" and CNN's Kyra Phillips described it as "full front page and in your face". 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'."
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 Monday Night Football half time show.
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". "["Fetus-X"] 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." The "Hartford Advocate" has called Millikin a "borderline sociopath."