I got a lot of Milt Gross strips from 1939. As I understand it, by that time he wasn't really doing all the work himself anymore. Bob Dunn was his assistant for many years, but I could not find any infromation on what years exactly. Or at least, probably not on the strips I am sharing here. Count Screwloose from Tooloose has run and been cancelled between 1929 and 1935 and those were the character's wildest years. But when it was revived in a slightly different (ess nutty) form as a cartoon series, apparently a new version of the strip was also created. It ran as a half page alongside his more popular That's My Pop (which he does seem to have drawn by himself) or sometimes was given a complete tabloid page for itself. A coule find very little about this later incarnation of the strip, so I wil be asking screwball expert Paul Tumey for some comments.
The seauence featuring the burglar clad in black in isteresting, because he is called The Blot and extremely similar to the famous Mickey Mouse villian of the same name. One would think that Gross' version was a reaction to the one created by Floyd Gottfredson, but in fact the version of Gross appeared earlier. Seeing how the giy followed by Count Screwloose is an actual burglar dressed in black and Mickey's version is an actual blot created by Mickey himself, this is all one extreme coincidence or both were reacin in a similar way to something in the news...
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