Friday, October 31, 2008

The Donkey and the Mayor

Friday comic book Day.

Howard Post is respected by a lot of cartoonists for his work on Harvey's Hot Stuff from 1957 onwards. He did equally impressive work for Dc and Prize in the mid-forties in an imitation Walt Kelly style. Thee weeks I am showing as much as I can from his career, the good, the bad and quite frankly the ugly.

Howartd Post did the worst work of his career in the early fifties, before joining up with Harvey. During this period he seems to have written his own material. An important little fact. He did a lot of work for Stan Lee's Timely. I sy Stan Lee's Timely, but actually it was Martin Goodman's Timely, but who the hell remembers the owner instead of the editor of most of the comics line? Post did some work for Stan Lee's silly girl strips, that were so popular in the late forties and early fifties. Unfortunaqtely, most of his titles seem to be among the most hard toi get. I don't know why Nellie the Nurse would have to be scarce, but it is. In 1953 he got a chance to do his own funny animal book. Goodman must have thought it was worth a shot. The funny animal corner of the market was very much taken by Dell comics, but there were more companiers doing this stuff, so it wasn't such a long shot. Unfortunately, The Moinkey and The Bear was not a very good book. As good an artist as Post may have been, he was always a bit to quick and facile for his own good. When he was forced to spend some more time on his books, his work became a bit more stilted, but all in all he packed more goodies in that stuff than in his efforts here. The main problem seems to be that he wrote his own stories. I have some stories he did for Timely's Mad imitations and that is the absolute worst he ever did. He seems to have tried to write these stories as fats as he drew them. The result is a couple of very badly written stories, that don't even show off the artist at his best. The chracters he created for this book are pretty obnoxious as well, as are most of the characters he created on his own.








So, what else did he do in these years? An artist who obviously work so fast, must have had another job on the side..

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I believe THE MONKEY AND THE BEAR was more than just a lame funny animal book from Atlas---it was a knock-off of DC's successful FOX & CROW.

Aside from the name, the characters have a similar relationship, AND check the designs---the BEAR is styled after the FOX, with his super exaggerated schnoz, bow-tie and pants, while the MONKEY's got a muzzle shaped like Crawford CROW's beak, a cigar, and derby-esque hat...

Blur your eyes a bit, and just look at any one of those pages!