Monday, March 23, 2009

Gross Negligence

Monday Cartoon Day.

I wasn't able to scan the promised further installments of Milt Gross' silent book reviews for Ken magazine, so they'll have to wait until next week. Instead, here are four censecutive episdes of a bit of illustrated dialect humor he did in the forties for This Week magazine. They were taken from his last book. After that he did contribute strips to the first twenty or so issues of ACG's comic book series The Killroys, as well as one issue of Milt Gross Funnies. I have added the story for The Killroys #13.













1 comment:

Smurfswacker said...

I loved "That's My Pop." It was genuinely funny. But I gave up part way through each of the text pieces. That dialect is just too tough to read!

Americans were crazy for dialect humor like that. My "How to Be a Good Speaker" books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries devote considerable space to dialect monologues.

There seemed to be a "standard" dialect for every major immigrant group except middle-class English. I've read many turn-of-the-century boys' books, and they're all loaded with dialect characters, both comic-relief and straight.

Are there similar standard dialects in other languages? What do Americans sound like in Dutch or French or Swedish comics?