Sam Gross

Brilliance by the (Sam) Gross

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« … while there are lines of taste that many cartoonists will not cross, Mr. Gross leaped over them, doused them with gasoline and lit them on fire, cackling as he did. » — Daniel E. Slotnik, from Gross’s NYT obit.

A couple of weeks ago, we lost yet another of our remaining cartooning titans, hardly a surprising turn of events given the march of time… but this growing void diminishes and impoverishes both the field and the world.

Gross has been eulogised all over the place, notably in obituaries in the New York Times and The New Yorker, his Lambiek entry is lovingly detailed, so there are precious few blanks left to fill in.

All this adulation and appreciation… and yet, all of his books are out of print, so far as I can ascertain. While this does not bode well, I like to think that some savvy publisher will soon make use of Gross’ fastidiously organised files, reportedly comprising over thirty thousand individual cartoons.

For this small homage, I’ve pulled some of my favourites from his most famous (the most infamous being We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons*), 1977’s I Am Blind and My Dog is Dead. Picking favourites is plenty laborious enough, I wasn’t going to slog through seven decades of material, indeed not.

Originally published in Saturday Review.
The only way this could have been funnier is if it had been published in the Audubon Society’s magazine… which did publish several of his cartoons — but not this one.
Originally published in Saturday Review.
One of the great perks of Gross’ range is that this cartoon can be viewed as totally cute and innocent or you’re-going-straight-to-hell filthy.
It’s a fairly safe bet that this particular beach is in Florida.
I was thinking that this one could have just as well been a Charles Addams cartoon… then recalled that Gross, early in his career, actually sold gag ideas to The New Yorker for Addams to illustrate. This one, interestingly, saw print in Ladies’ Home Journal.
Our most recent entry appeared in the pages of The American Bystander no. 3 (Fall, 2016), where he held his own reserved nook, ‘Sam’s Spot‘. Bless ’em.

In closing, this fabulous anecdote from his National Lampoon colleague Larry “Ratso” Sloman:

« After five years, I left the Lampoon and a new executive editor took over. He called Sam into his office. “From now on, I want pencil sketches from all the artists before they do anything,” he told Sam.

“Pencils! Cartoonists don’t do no stinkin’ pencils. Rodrigues will tell you to go fuck yourself rather than show you a pencil,” Sam said. “Oh, and by the way, you can go fuck yourself.” His tenure as cartoon editor was finished. But the funny thing is, Sam was still selling cartoons to the Lampoon long after that editor had been penciled out of his own job. »

-RG

*From Gross’ first-rate 2011 Comics Journal interview, conducted by Richard Gehr: « His doorbell sports an old family name because he doesn’t want to be hassled by anyone who might have been offended by his 2008 book We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons. »