Cartoonist, Author, Animator. In his heyday he was called “America’s Great Yiddish Humorist”, famed for the inventive dialect and Jewish sensibility of his zany comic strips and books. His gift for the absurd was epitomized in the series “Banana Oil” (1923 to 1930), “Count Screwloose from Tooloose” (1929 to 1935), and “That’s My Pop!” (1935 to 1940). All are part of a wryly observed world where trivial incidents escalate into catastrophes and there is always a disconnect between what is said and done, rendered with sketchy but dynamic drawings. Perhaps Gross’s finest single achievement is the book-length pictorial satire “He Done Her Wrong” (1930). Subtitled “The Great American Novel and Not a Word in It — No Music, Too”, it has been acclaimed as a forerunner of the graphic novel. He once said there were 10 rules to becoming a successful cartoonist: “Rule Number One is to be funny at all times. The other nine don’t count”. Milton Gross was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He left school at 16 to work as an office boy at Hearst’s New York American newspaper, where his first comic strip, “Jack Bull”, appeared in 1912. He created several more strips for the Evening Journal (1915 to 1917), served in France with the US Army during World War I, and was active in the budding animation field. In 1922 Gross joined the New York World and hit his stride with “Banana Oil”, a screwball satire of human hypocrisy. Its title and ubiquitous refrain, slang for “b.s.”, became a popular catch-phrase. Even better-received was his illustrated humor column “Gross Exaggerations” (debuted 1924), which presented the gossip of Jewish tenement-dwellers through imaginative phonetic dialect. Gross described it as “a literal translation of the Anglicized Russian Jew. At least, I try to make it so. It is the language of the people — conveyed at times in somewhat ludicrous character”. A collection of these columns, “Nize Baby” (1926), was a national bestseller and made Gross a celebrity, with fans ranging from H.L. Mencken and Charlie Chaplin to President Calvin Coolidge. He followed this with other books of dialect humor over the years: the Longfellow parody “Hiawatta witt No Odder Poems” (1926), “De Night in De Front from Chreesmas” (1927), “Dunt Esk” (1927), “Famous Fimmales witt Odder Ewents from Heestory” (1928), “Dear Dollink” (1944), and “I Shoulda Ate the Éclair” (1946). “He Done Her Wrong” – which has been called “a silent movie transferred to paper” – seems like an anomaly in his output, but it was a parody of Lynd Ward’s 1929 wordless novel (the first of its kind in America) “God’s Man”. Meanwhile, Gross had introduced his most famous character, “Count Screwloose”, in a weekly strip for the NY World. The crazy Count and his equally insane (and possibly imaginary) dog Iggy are inmates of the Nuttycrest asylum. Every Sunday he finds a novel way to escape into the free world, but after a few disastrous adventures he returns to the safety of Nuttycrest. His futile admonition to be kept out of trouble – “Iggy, keep an eye on me!” – became another popular colloquialism. Gross took “Count Screwloose” with him when he joined Hearst’s King Features Syndicate in 1931. There he launched “Dave’s Delicatessen” (1931 to 1935) and its spinoff “Grossly Xaggerated”, better known as “That’s My Pop!” (later a radio show). In 1945 Gross suffered a heart attack and retired from the deadlines of newspaper cartooning, choosing instead to explore comic book art. “Milt Gross Funnies” (2 issues, 1947) revived “Count Screwloose”, “Banana Oil”, and other old properties, and brought in a new character, the love-starved Pete the Pooch. Gross’s restless imagination prevented him from sticking with one series for very long. He created over 20 strips throughout his career and usually had two running concurrently, though many of them (“Frenchy”, “Babbling Brooks”, “Otto and Blotto”, etc.) lasted only a few months. A similar impatience accounts for his sporadic and still little-known ventures into films. In fact he was one of the earliest professional animators, having learned the trade during a 1916 moonlighting gig at the Raoul Barré studio. He created his first cartoon short as a solo effort, “The Ups and Downs of Mr. Phool Phan” (1917), and between 1919 and 1923 he turned out 12 more for producer J.R. Bray. Two of these survive, “We’ll Say They Do” and “Tumult in Toytown” (both 1919). From the late 1920s he visited Hollywood often and settled there in 1932, but he mostly dabbled as an uncredited screenwriter. (He contributed gags to Chaplin’s  1928 feature “The Circus”). In 1938 MGM hired Gross as a director and story man for its new cartoon studio. He made two remarkable shorts starring Count Screwloose (voiced by Mel Blanc), “Jitterbug Follies” (1939) and “Wanted: No Master” (1939), but MGM decided his humor was too lowbrow for them and abruptly cancelled the series. His last project was a proposed children’s television show based on “Pete the Pooch” (1953), combining animation with live-action sequences featuring himself as host. Two pilot episodes were completed but would never be aired. Gross died of a coronary aboard the Pacific Ocean liner SS Lurline, returning from a Hawaiian vacation with his wife. For many years afterwards, the National Cartoonists Society’s relief fund for indigent cartoonists was called the Milt Gross Fund in honor. The artists he influenced include Bob Clampett, “Mad” magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman and Al Jaffee, Jules Feiffer, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and John Kricfalusi. A 2006 reprinting of “He Done Her Wrong”, along with the publication of Ari Kelman’s “Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader” (2009) and Craig Yoe’s “The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story” (2010), marked a significant revival of interest in Gross’s work. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)  Family links:  Spouse:  Anne Abramson Gross (1900 – 1999)*  Children:  Herbert Gross (1921 – 2010)* *Calculated relationship