Milt Gross

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.

Comic strips and books 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. 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. Minus words, this "novel" is composed entirely of pen-and-ink cartoons, nearly 300 pages long, and is comparable to such silent films serials as The Perils of Pauline. It resembled (and parodied) Lynd Ward's Gods' Man, the first American wordless novel, published the previous year. . It has been reprinted several times, including an abridged version in 1983 (retitled Hearts of Gold) and in 2005 by Fantagraphics, under its original title. Animator William Hanna and screenwriter Joseph Barbera despised the experience and believed the films to be subpar. Gross would also co-write the 1943 Screen Gems cartoon He Can't Make It Stick (directed by John Hubley and Paul Sommer), after he pitched the story to then-producer Dave Fleischer and writer Stephen Longstreet.

Death On November 29, 1953, Gross died of a heart attack aboard the Pacific Ocean liner SS Monterey, while returning from a Hawaiian vacation with his wife. He was buried at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. At the time of his death, he was developing a children's TV show starring his character Pete the Pooch, which combined animation with live-action footage of Gross as host. Two pilot episodes were completed but never shown to the public.

Legacy In 2009 the New York University Press published Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader, which argues for Gross' importance as a link between the cartooning cultures of the first and second halves of the 20th century, especially as they related to Jewish culture.

In August 1971, Dover Publications reprinted Nize Baby. In 2010, cartoon historian Craig Yoe edited The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story, a complete collection of the Gross comic book stories from the 1940s with a lengthy illustrated biography by Yoe and an Al Jaffee introduction.