Why Don't He Twitt? An Insane 1928 Milt Gross Nize Baby

Here's another close-up appreciation/dissection of a gorgeously wacky Nize Baby Sunday page (a paper scan by me from my own collection) by that master of screwball masters: Milt Gross! Every image on this page is a funny drawing in itself -- beautifully composed and perfectly rendered. As if that weren't enuff, the writing is devastatingly funny - why don't he twitt? Indeed -- the tribulations of making the twitt toy twitt, getting the gimcrack do the thing it's supposed to do, but which it mysteriously won't. It's an existential dilemma to which we can all relate.

When you consider the hex-quizz-it visual screwballism of Milt Gross' Sunday comic, Nize Baby (9/12/26 - 2/10/29), it's surprising to learn that it developed from a written column. There's an organic flow to Milt's work. One creative output naturally leads to another, and they are all part of an entire dingbat universe.

In the mid 20's Milt Gross wrote a syndicated column called Gross Exaggerations, sprinkled with his cartoon illustrations. These were included as part of a Sunday supplement magazine that had humor pieces by Ring Lardner, celebrity gossip, and so on.

The columns were filled with the conversations of New Yawk City Jewish mothers leaning out of their tenement windows to chat in hilarious American-Jewish dialect. Often, Gross divided his columns into what was being said on the various floors.

Milt Gross was as accomplished a writer as he was a cartoonist.
His first book, Nize Baby, evolved from this newspaper column.  (Nov. 15, 1925)

In short order, the mother with the "nize baby" on the fourth floor began to dominate the columns with her Yidd-English versions of classic children's stories. It's a little hard to read the muddy microfilm scan above, so here's a transcription of the first few sentences:

"Fourth Floor: Oohoo, nize baby it opp all de Pust Tustizz, so momma'll gonna tell you a Ferry Tale from Bloobidd. Wance oppon a time was leeving a nobbleman in a cestle wot is was by heem blue de wheeskers. So all the keeds from de neighborhoot dey gave heem a neekname, "Bloobidd." (Nize baby, take anodder spoon Pust Tustizz)" (From Gross Exaggerations, November 15, 1925 by Milt Gross)

It works best to read Milt's prose out loud, and I imagine many folks cracked each odder up at the the time, doing that just that. The above tale of Bluebeard the pirate makes mention of "Pust Tustizz," the breakfast cereal called Post Toasties.

So that was Sundays. Then, during the week, Gross Exaggerations was a daily comic strip, mostly visual humor! Here's an example from around the same time as the column above:

Gross Exaggerations by Milt Gross -  November 23, 1925

Milt said he got the idea for Nize Baby from his wife: "I went home... and found that one of my children was misbehaving and wouldn't eat his supper. My wife was striving to comfort him with a recitation of 'Sing a song of sixpence,' but he wasn't to be comforted that way. So, suddenly on the wings of inspiration... I broke into a recitation of the same verse in Jewish dialect, 'Seenk a sunk from seex pants,' with the result that Mrs. gross burst into a pal of laughter and the child was diverted, too. Afterwards, at my wife's suggestion, I worked the thing up into the form of a mother telling a fairy tale to her infant and called it Gross Exaggerations." (Success Magazine interview, 1926)

The popular column was collected into Nize Baby, a book published by George Doran in 1926 -- Milt's first book. Here's what the first edition looks like. (You can buy this copy for a mere $550 from here).

This book (in a later edition, minus dustjacket) was my very first introduction to Milt Gross. Kevin Lacke, my college chum and fellow "bookie" at Bill's Bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida produced this book one drunken evening at his apartment. Kevin, a talented actor, adored the book and proceeded to perform a few of the pages for me in a perfect recitation of Gross' anglicized Russian-Jewish dialect, to my great delight. Somehow, in time, I managed to persuade Kevin to sell his copy of Nize Baby to me. I still have it!

Starting in 1926, on September 12, Nize Baby became a full color Sunday comic, topped by the single tier Banana Oil comic. So there's your hee story lesson. Now, for the fun!

Here's a delightful Nize Baby Sunday from August 26, 1928 that shows off both the visual and the verbal joys of Milt's screwball talent. If the page looks familiar, it's because it was included on page 289 of Bill Blackbeard's and Martin Williams' The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977).  Printing technology being what is was 34 years ago, the reproduction of the page is pretty muddy. Even so, this page was, for me, a standout in an amazing collection, and made me a lifelong Milt Gross fan. I recently was fortunate enough to acquire the actual page myself, and can now provide a creesp scan for you!

As with the previous Milt Gross Sunday page I've shared, I'll provide nice large versions of each panel that you can scroll through. However, to get started, here's the entire page, in a large paper scan from my own collection:

A paper scan from my own collection - Nize Baby by Milt Gross (August 26, 1928)

We have 14 panels in four tiers. The first two tiers are composed of three panels each. This allows Milt to work in a couple of "double-wide" panels that establish the living room scene. The bottom two tiers have more panels, with quicker beats, reflecting Pop Feitelbaum's escalation from amusement to annoyance to enraged insanity.

A word about Milt Gross and escalation. Many of his Sunday pages and later comic book stories are built around escalation. If you diagrammed the level of emotional intensity in these pieces, it would almost always be a sharp curve upward. This is mirrored by an ever-increasing series of calamitous events. Gross always pushes the joke out to the borders -- into screwball territory. It's been said that, when Chaplin came up with the idea of the tramp pretending he can walk a tightrope in The Circus, Gross (working for Chaplin as a writer at the time) was the guy who came up with the additional wrinkle of a circus monkey dropping a banana peel onto the wire in the tramp's path. Escalation.

Milt Gross wrote for Charlie Chaplin on The Circus.
The monkeys on the tightrope climax were  partially his work

In panel one, the squeaky toy is introduced. Don't you just love the goofy design of the toy?

In panel two, one toy is left for the nize baby (who's name happens to be Ignatz -- perhaps a tip of the hat to Herriman). When characters move in a Milt Gross comic, they almost always produce a perfect little dust cloud.

Pop has drunk the Kool-aid. He now has the expectation the toy will give a twitt and delight baby. We know different from the first time we read the comic. 

Gross' writing is all about phonetics and timing. He could have written so much more here-- but the 'Hm!' is all that's needed. Check out the composition here, too. The way the couch arm fills the space between the stretched tail and Pop, helping us really feel that stretch of the toy.

There's something beautifully funny about pronouncing "tweet" as "twitt" when the toy is broken. Pop's question is a an archetypal moment every person in the modern world asks - when the car won't start, when the email you just typed vanishes, when the computer won't start, when the DVD won't play. Imagine what Milt Gross could have done with today's car alarms and forever ringing cell phones. Somehow, Screwball comics are inextricably tied to our struggles with technology. 

The wide panel emphaisizes the streeeeeeetttttch. Pop is a resourceful guy -- he always a has solution...

... and it usually backfires -- in this case, literally so.

Poor Isidore. Izzy is often the recipient of a spanking when things go wrong. I don't spank my kid, but I do identify with Pop. So many times, I've done something stupid, or something was knocked over or broken and I have (I blush to admit) turned to my son and blamed him! Such is human nature! (I apologize to him when I get my cool back). Maw is totally unconcerned about the spanking...

Pop to twitt toy: You realize this means war.

Even using an old fashioned hearing trumpet... no twitt. This is exactly the same sort of thing I go through when the furshlugginer computer suddenly acts weird -- you try one crazy thing after another.

Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

But hark! A twit appears on the scene, twitting! Look at how Milt lets his line scrawl on Pop... his fury has distorted his form.

The pay-off... an incredible back-flip plop take, caused only by a little tweeting toy.

And Maggie's dishes, Ignatz's brick, Jerry's body are hurled once again.... the end.

Whew! Great stuff! These comics grossing on you? Wanna see more? Lemme know! Crickets are chirping on this blog, tumbleweeds rolling through....

MORE GROSS COMICS

For more Gross Exaggerations and hilarious rare early comics by Milt Gross, be sure to check this post at Ger Apeldoorn's Fabulous Fifties blog.

And see my earlier post for more Nize Baby:

Have a Gross Sunday -The Apex of Loose-Scrawl Cartooning

AND... A FURSHLUGGINER PLUG

Wanna see what sort of comics a guy who studies screwball comics makes? Then click here.

Some Nize Milt Gross Rarities

MILT GROSS MONDAY! MILT GROSS MONDAY! MONT GRISS MILDAY!

Presenting a small basket of miscellaneous Milt Gross goodies this week.

First up is a terrific inscription, supplied by Screwball scholar Carl Linich,by Milt to what appears to be a fellow co-worker, a female that he refers to seeing around in the newspaper offices. The inscription is totally charming. It's fun to see Milt using his genius for comic structure and details to woo a lady. As far as I know Gross was a devoted femily man, so his flirting here is all in fun -- or perhaps to butter up the lady who might be of some help to him? I really have no idea. In any case, it's way cool to see Milt's own scrawling handwriting -- his line in forming these words is identical to the bold squiggles of his comics in which we find so much delight and screwball magic.

A charming and flirtatious inscription from Milt Gross,
in his own gracefully screwy handwriting -
written on the flyleaf of his book Hiawatta
(from the collection of Carl Linich)

Next up is a Gross Exaggerations column by Milt Gross from 1926, with some great prose humor. Milt had an ongoing column all about various tenants in a multi-story tenement building in New York. This column begins with tales from the fourth floor, where the "nize baby" episodes take place:

June 16, 1926

One of the things I love about Milt Gross is that he was equally talented with words and pictures. Gross Exaggerations was also a daily comic strip. Here's a beautiful wordless example.

Gross Exaggeration by Milt Gross - November 23, 1925

That is all for this time around. I hope you enjoyed these rarities and be sure to tune in every Monday for more Milt Gross screwball madness!

Till the next time we may say hello,

Paul Tumey

The First Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross - 1931

Here's the very first Dave's Delicatessen Sunday by that inimitable achiever of screwballosity, Milt Gross. 

Dave's Delicatessen ran as a Sunday from June 7, 1931 to January 13, 1935. It was accompanied by the toppers Count Screwloose (an abbreviated version of an earlier full page incarnation) and That's My Pop. The comic also ran as a daily strip from July 13, 1931 to August 5, 1933. Here's three examples of the daily:

The basic idea of the strip was that Dave ran a Jewish deli and each episode featured a different eccentric character or characters coming across Dave's path. It was a toned-down, inverted variation on Milt Gross' theme of insanity in everyday life. Where Papa Feitelbaum in Nize Baby over-reacted in crazy ways, Dave is always grounded in a world of crazy characters. In his previous Sunday pages, Nize Baby (1926-1929) and Count Screwloose of Tooloose (1929-1931), Gross created epics in miniature around the comedy of escalation. You can read some of these operas of comic destruction and frustration  in these postings:

Why Don't He Twitt: An Insane 1928 Milt Gross Nize Baby

The Escalated Hypocrisy of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose

Dave's Delicatessen moved to a different, more subdued rhythm -- but saying a Milt Gross strip is subdued  is a little like saying a half dozen bottle rockets is not as explosive as a roman candle. In his new strip, Gross -- ever the growing artist -- challenged himself with moving from episodic to narrative humor. While each episode of Dave's Delicatessen remains a single unit with very little continuity, Gross often presented entire little compressed stories with a beginning, middle, and end -- all worked into a single Sunday page.

Such is the case with the very first 18-panel episode of Dave's Delicatessen, in which Dave is completely conned by two silly swindlers. It's a brilliant debut, jam-packed with Gross' visual and verbal play, oddballs, and goofy scenes -- such as in panel 8, in which a woman shoplifts a sausage with a expanding grabber thingie protruding from the pocket of her socialite dress.

The first Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross
June 7, 1931
(courtesy of Carl Linich)

Look at how, in the last panel, Gross makes the mug shot book unrealistically gigantic -- allowing us, the reader, to see what it is. This sort of freedom to expertly stray from one-on-one representation reveals the true mastery of Gross. While Dave's Delicatessen doesn't provide as many visual pyrotechnics as his earlier strips, it does offer some of the most stuffed comics ever -- and belongs among the greatest of Milt Gross' achievements.

Many thanks to Carl Linich, who provided this beautiful paper scan from his own collection.

All the Best,
Paul Tumey

Milt Gross Fur and Wide - Count Screwloose 1928

Milt Gross Monday

A new Milt Gross comic every Monday!


I've been sharing some prime examples of Milt Gross' Nize Baby, the hyper-screwball chronicles of the ill-fated Feitelbaum family. Today, I'm layin' a new and equally terrific Milt Gross comic, Count Screwloose of Tooloose on your pleased peepers.

This feature gave the world the once popular catchphrase, "Iggy keep an eye on me!" The basic frame of the strip is the same in every episode: The Count escapes from the Laughing Academy, leaving his (imaginary?) dog pal, Iggy, behind. Out among the normal and sane folks, the Count sees episodes of people doing such nutty stuff that he runs back to the relatively saner asylum and Iggy, begging "Iggy, keep an eye on me!"

The theme of insanity in everyday life is one that was introduced into comics and developed into a rich wellspring by Rube Goldberg. Gross and Goldberg were pals, and there's no doubt that Gross was heavily influenced by Goldberg's methods of reaching for the funniest image over the best-drawn, and of deriving humor by revealing how no one is spared from moments of sheer screwball behavior.

Today's offering is a very early episode of the comic, scanned from my own paper collection, complete with the original Bananna Oil topper. Gross' Banana Oil is very similar in concept to Rube Goldberg's cartoon series, Baloney, which became a catchphrase: "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney!" Gene Ahern, that other towering screwball cartoonist, would occasionally have his characters utter "pickle smoke!" in the same vein.

This page has The New York World cutline at the top of the page. The World was one of the first papers to hire Gross, publishing his Gross Exaggerations column, out of which grew the Nize Baby comic. In 1931, Gross was hired into the King Features group of cartoonists by William Randolph Hearst, and his comics saw a much higher circulation, winning him national popularity. The pre-1931 Gross Sundays are especially fresh and edgy, taking chances and boldly striding into place few other newspaper cartoonists dared to go.

I've mentioned before that Milt Gross' Sundays are about the comedy of escalation. This comic is no exception, as the neighboring wives compete with each other to see who can acquire the largest fur adornment until they become, um, grossly puffed up in the sublime wordless 11th panel -- a perfect visual metaphor of the inflated ego. There's another joke in play as well, as the men work ever harder to support this insane prideful competition.

Count Screwloose of Tooloose by Milt Gross - May 12, 1928
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

In the end, the Count bikes furiously back to Nuttycrest and his canine pal Iggy. I've always thought it was funny that Iggy wears a Napoleon hat, a cartoon symbol of insanity -- he's there as a fellow inmate!

Don't Miss:

tomorrow's Rube Goldberg Tuesday!


That is all,
Screwball Paul

A Spectacular Milt Gross Back to School Screwball Comic (Count Screwloose 1931)

Here's a terrific Milt Gross screwball comic from 1931, scanned from my collection, and featuring a classic panoramic panel of college craziness.

As my son Reid and my girlfriend's daughter, Olivia, are among the millions gearing up to return to school in a few daze, this Count Screwloose about college lept out and grabbed me by the textbooks. As I'm sure readers are aware, American university fraternities have long been a rich vein of wild and wacky behavior. The big joke in the strip below is that the town planners feel a college would add dignity to their community, only to find the antics of college frat boys are anything but dignified!

The topper comic on this page is Babbling Brooks, which refers to the main character - a well-meaning goofus who always manages to say the wrong thing. Even the topper on this page ends with a mad crowd-scene spectacle -- Gross must have been feeling ambitious when he drew this page. Gross did a Babbling Brooks daily early in his career, from October,  1922 to February 1923, and then returned to the character nine years later in his Sunday topper version, from October, 1930 to May, 1931.

Milt Gross' ode to college craziness from April 5, 1931

The structure of this comic is slightly different than many of the Milt Gross Sunday pages from the late 20s and early 30s we've been studying. Instead of a steady escalation of a situation beyond all reasonable expectations, today's comic offers two tiers of a calm, quiet set-up, followed by an abrupt explosion of zaniness. The structure in this comic is not escalation so much as it is an explosion. The first 5 panels are the slow hissing burn of a fuse, and the final, spectacular panel offers a fireworks display of screwball comedy.

Here's the panel, in a large format, so you can appreciate it in all its screwball glory!

In appropriately reverse fashion, let's now take a closer look at the first panel of the Count Screwloose above. Gross has created a vastly over-complex and downright silly mechanism that allows The Count his escape from Nuttycrest. This is undoubtedly a tribute to the great Rube Goldberg, who is famous for his chain-reaction invention cartoons.

Even the final panel of Gross' Count Screwloose cleverly echoes Goldberg's dailies of the time, which were sometimes panoramic one-panels with a tiny panel inset in the lower right (usually a Benny Sent Me).

I don't know yet the exact nature of the connection between Milt Gross and Rube Goldberg. The only mention of Gross in Peter Marzio's excellent 1973 biography, Rube Goldberg His Life and Work, occurs on page 103, where he describes the fantastic 500-guest-large New Year's Eve parties Rube and his wife Irma hosted in 1925-30. Gross was among the many cartoonists there, including Winsor McCay, George McManus, Peter Arno, Billy DeBeck, and many others who all drew cartoons on huge sheets of paper hung on the walls of Rube's home near Central Park. (Oh, to have those sheets!)

Whatever their personal connection might have been, it's clear from studying the work of both cartoonists that Milt Gross was Rube Goldberg's cartoon heir. He carried on Goldberg's approach to comics and humor in cartoon form, right down to building entire series around human foibles such as the difference between what we say and do. The other major screwball cartoonists to notably further this tradition -- including the grand panoramic Hogarthian-style spectacle as seen in the above Count Screwloose -- are Mad's Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder (who mostly worked together as a team), in the generation after Gross. In this sense, you could say that Milt Gross -- most active in the 1920s and 30s -- is the artistic/screwball link between the work of Rube Goldberg (active 1904-1962) and Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder (active 1940s-early 1990s).

However, Harvey Kurtzman grew up with the comics of Rube Goldberg, too. His fiorst comics were chalk drawing son New York city streets titled Ikey and Mike (after Goldberg's Mike and Ike They Look Alike).

That's all for now. I have to go steal the Big Boy statue and place him on top of the Space Needle to get my frat pin...

Creator of blogs nice 'n' roomy,
I'm the guy - Paul Tumey

Milt Gross Meets Rudy Megaphone (1930)

Milt Gross Monday

A new Milt Gross comic every Monday!

Ah, celebrities. We love 'em.

It's said that Albert Einstein read and adored Milt Gross. Paul Picasso, James Joyce, and Gertude Stein were avid fans. Robert Frost wrote an (unpublished) ode to Count Screwloose. It's well known that meetings between FDR and Churchill often broke down into laugh-fests over Gross's books. Years later, JFK and Kruschev discovered peace-promoting common ground over a mutual regard for the comics of Milt Gross (Nixon never liked them - he said didn't get them). More than one scientist has credited Gross' fractal-driven images as the primary inspiration for the discovery of the DNA double-helix model.  Even the great film comedian Charlie Chaplin loved the humor of Milt Gross so much that he hired him to help write one of his greatest films, "The Circus."


Eau Kaye, so I might be elaborating just a tad. I actually made up all of the above, just for fun. Wouldn't it be wonderful if any it were true? Waitaminnit! One part of all that nonsense IS true, wonderfully true: Milt Gross really did co-concoct with Charlie Chaplin (also his pal) -- that much is true. Here's a sweet little newspaper item from 1926:

Hartford Courant, May 5, 1926

The above article was found on the wonderful website, Silent Comedians, which will interest many readers of this blog.

Here's today's Milt Gross offering, a full Sunday page meditation on  celebrities, in this case the immortal Rudy Megaphone:

That's all for me today! I'm leaving this booby-hatch for a saner world and smarter people!

Sincerely Not,
Count Tumeyloose

Milt Gross Teaches Us How to Learn - The Screwloose Way (1930)

Milt Gross Monday

A New Milt Gross Comic Every Monday!

We don't usually associate Milt Gross, the master of screwball comics, with moral lessons and parables. As today's example shows Gross' work is actually filled with trenchant observations of humanity's craziness that could be seen as a sort of textbook on how not to live. This wisdom aspect of screwball comics is actually a fairly common element. Starting with Rube Goldberg's Lunatics I Have Met in the early 1900s, screwball comics embraced insanity in a way that actually shows the reader the logical and expected result to expect from certain choices and attitudes. I sometimes think that screwball comics at their finest are sublime depictions of people tossing and turning as they sleepwalk through life. They are delightful because they are -- in essence -- saying something about the dream state most of us are often in, whether we realize it or not.

Curiously, Milt decorates his canoe in this
comic with a swastika - a very old symbol that was
adopted by the Nazi party in 1920

Today's Milt Gross Monday comic is another in his Count Screwloose series. In this episode, Gross explores the idea of book learning versus acquired experience. As usual, he presents us with a character that takes things to the absurd extreme. The gag is yet another variation on Gross' comedy of escalation, as the self-made man, a skeptic of academia, journeys with great expense and bother to the far corners of the world to learn the exact  knowledge that was first offered to him in a classroom.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes it's not possible to teach someone something simply by telling them? We often must go through our own elaborate Milt Gross style comedies to be able to see what was in front of us the whole time.

Count Screwloose by Milt Gross - Nov 2, 1930

The strip is framed with the usual Count Screwloose structure - the Count escapes from Nuttycrest, leaving his pal Iggy (a dog with a Napoleon complex) in tears at the separation. The Count then becomes our surrogate in the "sane" world as he quietly observes. At the end, overwhelmed by the nuttiness he has silently witnessed, the tiny Count (who is stranded in a distant foreign land) rides on the back of a fish back towards Nuttycrest, dreaming of reuniting with his pal, Iggy.

The art on this page reminds me very much of Sergio Aragones.

Note: I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but we skipped the last two days due to technical difficulties. We have now resumed our normally scheduled broadcast.

That is all,
Screwball Paul

The Escalated Hypocrisy of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose

Milt Gross had several dynamics in his humor. One was the comedy of escalation, in which he kept increasing the conditions of a situation to ridiculous extremes. Another dynamic Gross employed is the humor of hypocrisy, in which he draws laughter from the difference between what people say and what they actually do. Gross built an entire strip, Banana Oil (daily 1923-25, Sunday 1926-30) on the latter dynamic In today's comic, a large, cleaned up 300 dpi paper scan from my own archives, Milt puts both of these dynamics into play.

Escalation occurs when the protagonist of this episode, as observed by the Count, has to deal with one crazy interruption after another. Neckties and insurance are silly enough, but a picture on a pony is pretty screwy!

The hypocrisy sets in when we see that our guy was very patient and allowing of the interruptions at the office, but when his son asks him a simple question at home, he explodes with comic rage, destroying his home and spanking his child. Gross -- a dedicated and loving father -- shows us how NOT to be a Dad. At the end, the Count and Iggy play pool at Nuttycrest with veggies and a broom. Along the way, we meet a host of odd and entertaining characters. I ask you, does it get any better?

The comedy of escalation and the humor of hypocrisy are the foundations for a superb Milt Gross screwball comic
January 18, 1931 (from the collection of Paul Tumey)

The first panel is Milt Gross' version of the classic Rube Goldberg chain-reaction invention cartoon. Gross did a few of these in 1931.

I don't know if he and Rube were friends, but I do know that Gross looked up to Rube and was heavily influenced by him. The doctor in this comic is straight outta Rube Goldberg casting...

And, just for fun, here's a couple of close ups of cartoons from today's Milt Gross Monday comic that show Milt's endless inspiration for drawing funny people. What makes these work is that these aren't just drawings... these characters have their own agendas and motivations -- they think they are real!

Well gang, sadly I must inform you that this will probably be the only post I can manage this week and next. I am still eyebrows-deep in a screwball comics related project that is claiming most of my time. In a week or so, I am flying from Seattle to New York City to work lend a hand on an exciting new  Rube Goldberg book by Jennifer George -- Rube Goldberg's grand-daughter and Director of Rube Goldberg, Inc. My fellow screwball scholar, Carl Linich will also be helping out on this book, and I'm looking forward to meeting him in person! There is much prep work to be done this week, including a mountain of scanning and so I have to give my usual "blog time" to this new project for a couple of weeks. Around all this, I am still running Presentation Tree and being a single father during summer vacation - phew! I hope you'll kindly forgive the infrequent August postings, knowing that my energies are contributing in a very small way to help create a cool new book on a screwball master!

Please browse around the older articles you may have missed -- there is already a lot of good reading material on this blog.

A lot more Milt Gross comics you can only find on this blog (new scans from my archive of paper originals) are posted here.

And please spread the word about this blog -- Screwball Comics, Now More Than Ever!

Flip-takingly Yours,
Paul Tumey