Milt Gross
| Milt Gross | |
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| Born |
March 4, 1895 Bronx, New York City, New York, United States |
| Died | November 29, 1953 (aged 58) |
| Nationality | American |
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Notable works
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Milt Gross (March 4, 1895 – November 29, 1953) was an American cartoonist and animator. His work is noted for its exaggerated cartoon style and Yiddish-inflected English dialogue. He originated the non-sequitur "Banana Oil!" as a phrase deflating pomposity and posing. His character Count Screwloose's admonition, "Iggy, keep an eye on me!", became a national catchphrase. The National Cartoonists Society fund to aid indigent cartoonists and their families for many years was known as the Milt Gross Fund. In 2005, it was absorbed by the Society's Foundation, which continues the charitable work of the Fund.
Gross was born in the Bronx and served as a soldier in World War I. After apprenticing as a teenage assistant to Tad Dorgan, Gross's first comic strip was Phool Phan Phables for the New York Journal, begun when he was 20, featuring a rabid sports fan named George Phan. It was one of several short-lived comic strips (and other undertakings, including his first animated film) before his first success, Gross Exaggerations, which began as an illustrated column, "Gross Exaggerations in the Dumbwaiter", in the New York World. Originally titled Banana Oil until 1925, the comic strip was retitled Gross Exaggerations until becoming The Feitelbaum Family on June 1, 1926, and finally Looy Dot Dope on January 7, 1927. Its Yinglish vocabulary would set the tone for much of Gross' work, as would its reworkings of well-known tales, as in "Nize Ferry-tail from Elledin witt de Wanderful Lemp" and "Jack witt de Binn Stuck". These were gathered in a 1926 book Nize Baby, which evolved into a Sunday newspaper color comic strip.
Also in 1926, he published Hiawatta witt No Odder Poems, a 40-page parody of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, each of its pages, in the words of Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., "with a barely decipherable stanza and a drawing which only sometimes helped". In subsequent years, Gross followed with De Night in de Front from Chreesmas, Dunt Esk (1927) and Famous Fimmales witt Odder Ewents from Heestory (1928).
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