Somewhere between 1944 and 1946, cartoon favorite Milt Gross wrote and drew a weekly page for the King features Sunday Supplement Pictorial review. This entertainment was a selection of illustrated columns and features, including the Hedda Hopper gossip page, as well as columns illustrated by Virgil Partch, Colin Allen, Bob Bugg, Otto Soglow, Colin Allen and other great names of the period. Gross provided a series of letters from a Jewish mother to her soldier son. The text was in the faux yiddish that Gross developed himself for Nize baby, full of funny and made-up words and almost impossible to read. Even out loud it was often not clearer (though it sounds great). There was a book by the same name published in 19445, but I am not sure if that contained material from the column o if the column in fact was a continuation of the book. Anyway, the colum ran for long beyond the book and seems to have had three times as many illustrations. I have been quite careful in showing these scans, because over the years I have been trying to get all of them so that I could one day try and do a (digital) collection of them. Only problem is that I have been going for a couple of years and I have been going nowhere. These sections are either very rare or they never come up for sale. Another problem would be the right format yo reproduce them in. I have made quite big scans that you should be able to enlarge and read (if you can manage the faux Yiddish), But to make it work in book form you would either have to produce a large book (which is more suited to those early Sunday pages than this) or reformat them, which would involve a lot of very difficult retyping. And of course, then there is the problem that most of it is actually unreadable. Good as it is, these pages are tiring. I don;t know if a complete collection would actually attract anyone.
If there is anyone out there who, like my, would like to see more or even cab provide further scans, I would love to hear from you. These are my pages from 1944.
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