Media: Milt Gross' Cartoon Tour of New York

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


It's especially gratifying when an animation professional stumbles across this blog and immediately grasps what it is we're doing and how important it is to the art of animation. A while back, animation director, Kent Butterworth (www.attilatheham.com) was doing a web search for Ralph Bakshi and found our post on Ralph's Phone Doodles. Kent was excited by what he saw and bounced around the site, discovering that the archive is located less than a mile from his home. It was a Tuesday afternoon, so he jumped in the car and came right over to see what we were doing. I gave him the tour and explained how the database we are building is intended to work, and he was behind the concept 100 percent. On Thursday he was back, with a stack of books and comics to allow us to digitize.

Kent's collection is amazing, and the scope is huge. He brought a hard drive full of scans of vintage comic books by dozens of great artists, 40s Colliers magazines with Virgil Partch cartoons, original Sunday pages by Cliff Sterrett, and a book I've never seen before... Milt Gross' Cartoon Tour of New York.

Milt Gross is one of the greatest comic artists who ever lived. His books Nize Baby, He Done Her Wrong and Dunt Esk are classics of ethnic New York humor. His drawing style is direct and funny with absolutely flawless staging, composition and expression. Gross's Cartoon Tour of New York was published as a program guide for tourists visiting the 1939 New York World's Fair, and it's an amazing time capsule into life in the "big apple" in its golden age. If Weegee's Naked City depicts the front page view of this marvellous time and place, Gross' Cartoon Tour tells the Funny Pages version.

A lot of this book appears to have been drawn by Milt Gross' assistant, but there's still plenty of joy in ever panel. Here are scans of the entire book. Enjoy!










































Many thanks to Kent Butterworth for sharing this great book with us!

For more Milt Gross cartoon goodness, see... Milt Gross Sunday Pages and Dailies Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven. Also see... Chic Young's Blondie, Rube Goldberg's Side Show; George Lichty's Grin and Bear It, Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two and Part Three; and Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

6.28.08
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