By Milt Gross
IDW Publishing
Buy it Here
I had heard of Milt Gross for as long as I can remember but I never had really read much of his comics work.
Then, about a decade back, I found myself researching Milt Gross for the first of two volumes put out by Yoe Books via IDW, the one reprinting his comic book stories and the other his World’s Fair book.
As anyone who encounters the man’s manic output is likely to do, I became a fan.
With us today we have yet another IDW Milt Gross collection, this one packaged by Sunday Press.
Gross Exaggerations: The Meshuga Comic Strips of Milt Gross, dives deep into the humorist’s bread and butter newspaper comics and makes me appreciate him even more.
Milt Gross had a fascinating career that included time in Hollywood writing for both big (MGM) and small (PRC) studios, but this book offers endless highlights of all the screwball strips and crazy characters that made the reputation that got him to Tinseltown in the first place.
Mark Newgarden, Paul C. Tumey, and Ivan Brunetti offer the usual informative texts and the early part of the book presents quite a few early, later, and lesser-known strips and pieces of art.
Unfortunately—at least in the review PDF I have—there are some mistakes in the captioning of the artwork. For example, the caption under the cover of 1947’s Milt Gross Funnies #1 says, for some reason, “April 6, 1939.” Another That’s My Pop comic book page says, “From Moon Mullins Comics, May 25, 1939.” According to the Grand Comics Database, Moon Mullins didn’t have a comic book in 1939 and, even if it did, what’s that date supposed to be? Comic books weren’t dated so specifically.
While that kind of thing is important when dealing with a book that will presumably be used for reference on Gross in years to come, the real meat of this volume is what comes next, and that’s more than 120 full-color pages of impeccably reproduced nonsense by a master at his peak.
Although not a complete collection, all of Gross’s major strips from the late 1920s into the mid-1930s have long representative runs presented, complete with their topper strips (which, in later years, often invaded the main strips!).
We start with Nize Baby, with its pronounced Yiddish sensibilities that grew out of Vaudeville dialect comedy. Essentially the weekly tribulations of a Jewish family, the mother, the father, the oldest son (Looey Dot Dope), the youngest son (Nize Baby) and poor, put-upon Isidore, the middle boy. We’re told that Gross’s employment of the dialect created a national craze for Yiddishisms! The topper strip to Nize Baby is Gross’s famous Banana Oil!
Banana Oil continued on when Nize Baby was replaced by Count Screwloose of Tooloose. The Count escapes a lunatic asylum weekly, always leaving behind his canine friend with a Napoleon complex, Iggy. After a number of panels in which he sees how insane the outside world is, he always returns to the familiarity of the asylum.
Eventually Banana Oil gave way to Babbling Brooks, a rotund everyman who regularly got into trouble by talking too much. Brooks disappeared when Count Screwloose and Iggy took over the topper themselves, now working for “The Colonel.”
The main strip morphed into Dave’s Delicatessen but eventually Screwloose came back down to join the deli cast, although Iggy was replaced by a more traditional dog named J.R. The Colonel himself took over the topper for a while, only to be replaced by two talking penguins, Otto and Blotto, all the while inexplicably retaining the Count Screwloose title. Meanwhile, another famous Gross creation, That’s My Pop! worked its way into a regular side panel appearance so by that point fans were getting three separate and very different strips from Gross per week!
The nutty humor, even without the Yiddishisms, comes across as big city Jewish for the most part, and was likely an influence on the likes of Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Harvey Kurtzman, and so many others.
Then, with modern humor being influenced so much by those guys, one can make the case that Milt Gross, who just thought he was being silly and having fun with his goofy characters, ended up being one of the most influential people of the 20th century…and all because of all the banana oil contained in this volume.
Booksteve recommends.
