Chris Monroe, Artist with a Netflix Series

Chris Monroe, the creator of "Monkey with a Tool Belt," has been part of Twin Cities life ever since her first comic was published here in 1985, but now she’s going worldwide.

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Of all the Zoom calls that have happened in this country over the last year, I bet the most glamorous monkey-themed one happened one night in May, when Chris Monroe poured herself a banana daiquiri in her Duluth home and joined some 70 other TV folks—mainly in New York and Ireland—to celebrate the Netflix launch of Chico Bon Bon: Monkey with a Tool Belt. 

“My publisher, Lerner, sent a huge bouquet of flowers and candy,” Monroe told me. “Silvergate, the production company, sent champagne and Chico Bon Bon socks. A whole bunch of people were drinking out of banana flasks. Some people were dressed as monkeys. The Irish crew made this really funny video with their head guy talking about repairing a dishwasher with a big funnel and dumb tools—it was so funny I was crying laughing.” 

This particular banana-and-champagne transatlantic Zoom soirée was three decades in the making. 

Monroe is well known to many in the Twin Cities, particularly readers of the long-gone alt-weekly Twin Cities Reader (also the one-time home of journalist legends David Carr and the editor-who-would-be-mayor, R. T. Rybak). That was where Monroe’s most popular comic, Violet Days, first reached a big audience back in 1996. Once the Reader folded, the series soon vaulted to the Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune, where it ran through 2018. 

Do you remember Violet Days? It was as much a part of the alt-scene of Minneapolis as the Replacements, chronicling our particular local brand of quirk (lots of ice jokes). At the time, Monroe’s vivid illustrations also popped up as art on countless record albums and show posters. (Legend has it that Bob Dylan bought a stack of T-shirts featuring a Chris Monroe drawing of, you guessed it, Bob Dylan.)

To celebrate Monroe’s sudden worldwide, banana-accented success, I got a copy of Ultra Violet, a 2004 anthology of the early years of Violet Days. I was shocked (and delighted) at how many of the old strips I remembered and how many bits of Twin Cities history they captured. Little things like Prince’s interchangeable and staggeringly svelte dancers at Glam Slam, Y2K worries, and how large The Mighty Ducks loomed once upon a time. In the 18 years Monroe lived in the Cities, she was also showing her fine art at places including the gallery Rifle Sport and coffee shops like the Global Café. Hundreds of Twin Cities living rooms may indeed boast framed Monroes in appreciation of her particular style of intricate, yet primitively expressive, line art conveying wry irony and childlike wonder.

The roots of that childlike wonder might be found in the earliest days of Monroe’s cartooning. The middle girl of three daughters, Monroe grew up in Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood. Her dad was a court reporter and a referee for different school sports, and her mom had her own shop and volunteered at Planned Parenthood. “I had all of these Peanuts paperbacks and Ed Emberley’s drawing books,” Monroe told me on the phone from her downtown Duluth art studio. “I drew so many cartoons as a little kid that I actually got in trouble in third grade for doing too many assignments as cartoons. I’d have George Washington crossing the Delaware and saying something I found hilarious at the time. I remember my teacher taking me aside and saying: ‘You know, the Revolutionary War wasn’t that funny.’” 

Also not funny to the young Monroe: a future in Duluth. At the time, the city was fading as a shipping center. “I think when I was in junior high and high school, the Duluth population dropped by 25,000 people,” she said. “I was here for the big decline, and all I wanted to be was Rhoda in Mary Tyler Moore, down in Minneapolis doing window displays.” 

Window displays were a big thing for artists at the time: Andy Warhol famously paid his bills creating them before he struck it big. Once Monroe was down in the cities and had graduated from MCAD, she found work designing windows for various clients in the Uptown mall, then called Calhoun Square. “It was not quite as glamorous and Andy Warhol–esque as I envisioned it. It was a lot of going in at night and hanging things from fishing line that would break.”

What followed, post–window design, was a long, long period of local fame accompanied by not much in the way of local riches. Even though she was one of the Twin Cities’ premier cartoonists, Monroe worked at Seward Co-op, waitressed, and picked up various freelance illustrating gigs on the side to pay the bills. At one point, she was called in to illustrate someone else’s book for privately owned children’s publishing heavyweight Lerner Publishing Group here in Minneapolis. Still, the Cities never made her art life exactly easy. 

So, in 1998, after 18 years in the Twin Cities, Monroe moved back up to Duluth, with her young son in tow. She got a job in a hardware store and kept at it—writing her popular cartoon and doing her fine art on the side (scheduling an art sale in the Cities before Christmas every year to get money to buy her son presents). In 2015, she added another job to her roster, as one of the opening bartenders at the Vikre Distillery cocktail room. She bought a little house on the hill in Duluth, one with a giant rock in the backyard that looks like a big elephant with a little elephant. 

“There was a breakup involved,” she said, “but I was a little tired of Minneapolis, too. I wanted to bring my son up here and take life a little slower. We go to Minneapolis on the weekends. It’s super fun. But when we’re driving back and all the traffic is going the other way, it feels good. We’re going the right way.” 

At the hardware store, Monroe’s duties included buying toys to sell. “I’d always be looking for any good tools, anything like that,” she said. “My son was the right age for Bob the Builder, but he hated Bob the Builder. I mean, he loved cartoons. We’re a cartoon family; we would watch Rugrats together, South Park, Rocko’s Modern Life, SpongeBob, The Simpsons—that was our mom-and-son time.” They both loved tools, loved cartoons, and hated Bob the Builder. 

Then, Monroe got a chance to show her work in a Minneapolis Warehouse District bar, a bar that she later learned was very disorganized. “They didn’t do anything they said they would do to promote the show. I show up, I’m like, Oh no. It was a couple blocks from Lerner, so I called over there: ‘I’m going to have the worst art opening of all time, you should stop over.’”

Adam Lerner, son of the founder, had just taken over the children’s publisher, and the person she called brought him along. He liked what he saw and bought a few pieces. “He said, ‘If you want to bring them to my office when the show comes down, that would be great.’ That’s how a really horrible experience turned out to be a hopeful experience,” Monroe remembers happily. “When I delivered the art, he said, ‘If you ever write a book, you should give it to me. Your style is so unique.’ So, I was like: ‘Hmmm…how do I write a children’s book?’” 

She didn’t know. She started by brainstorming names, and Chico Bon Bon rose to the top—Chico after the Marx brother, and Bon Bon because it sounded nice. Growing up in Duluth, Monroe loved local TV broadcasts on afternoon weekends, when the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges were in a constant rotation. “Harpo’s my favorite, but I actually have read all their autobiographies, and Chico was a beautiful man,” she said. “As a character he was a bad boy, a troublemaker. I always liked him. I liked his hat.” 

The name percolated in the back of her mind for a long, long time. Until she got the jolt of inspiration you only get when you find your car is all but dying on I-35. “I was going to drop my son with my ex in Hinckley, and I started thinking, This car is a piece of crap, and it’s going to die soon. You have to write that book and submit that manuscript.” 

Sitting in the sickly car, Monroe pulled a paystub from the hardware store out of her bag and used the back to outline the first Monkey with a Tool Belt book. “I pitched it to Adam, he handed it to the acquisition people, and they bought it,” she said. “I was an overnight success after 20 years of hard work.” The first Monkey with a Tool Belt came out in 2008, followed by another decade of hard work. 

Given the titles, do I need to describe the Monkey with a Tool Belt books, including the new addition this past August, Monkey with a Tool Belt Blasts Off!? Quite simply, they’re about a monkey who encounters problems and then solves them using tools. In the books, he does this far more whimsically, and the animated, detailed drawings encourage preschool eyes to hunt all around pages packed with imaginative additions, just like in Violet Days. Silvergate actually optioned the books soon after publication, but then, nothing happened.

By the time 2018 dawned, Monroe was still bartending, still writing her Monkey books, still working on her fine art, still having Christmas sales for Christmas cash, and still inking her Star Tribune and Duluth News Tribune comic, Violet Days. “I ran that comic for 22 years, and it got to the point where I thought, God, I’m sick of this thing,” she admitted. “It was like it ran its course for me. Then I got dropped by the Star Tribune. It was ideal, really. Perfect timing. It was a little sad, but then it wasn’t. After doing something weekly for 22 years, getting out from it was freeing,” she said.

With newspapers in such dire shape—in the United States, some 1,800 have closed since 2004—Monroe had little hope or interest in a new newspaper comic. Film didn’t look too hot either. “Monkey with a Tool Belt had been optioned in 2010, so long ago I didn’t have any expectations. It just languished; deals came and went. Nothing.” But then she thought: “‘Well, one job is gone, I’ll shake things up. I’m just going to focus on a few things, like the children’s books.’ I quit Vikre. Literally a couple weeks after I quit both those jobs, suddenly everything started speeding up with Monkey with a Tool Belt and Netflix. It was like I cleared this psychic space, and the universe threw me a bone.” 

Suddenly, Monroe’s phone was ringing, and she was asked to contribute scripts for the show. (Search out the one in the second season about coal-fired robot gnomes.) Suddenly, Monroe was watching animated rough drafts, called animatics, voiced by placeholder Irish voices from the Irish animation team. Suddenly, Monroe was seeing her little spidery and emotional drawings zoom off into commercial life and become a whole other thing, something slick, with extra characters and kicky music. And just as quickly these characters transformed into merch. Silvergate, her production team, is the team behind merch juggernaut The Octonauts, as well as the big hit Hilda. 

Monroe quickly discovered that plugging along at her craft and her art since the mid-’80s could get her onto TV in Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Japan—when Netflix streams worldwide, it streams worldwide. Chico speaks Portuguese now, and Dutch. 

And what’s next, now that this monkey is a star? You know how Netflix auto-plays little snippets of shows when you’re changing shows? Monroe’s four-year-old granddaughter, who lives with Monroe and Monroe’s son, will be sitting in the living room watching Netflix and suddenly will be served one of those autoplay snippets, showing Chico on an adventure. But it’s an adventure Monroe never dreamed up, as the shows are now written by global contributors. What’s next for Monroe is watching Chico Bon Bon, just like any of us, with surprise and wonder. “And maybe,” she said, “teaching a master class in not giving up.” 

This article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue.

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