Yesterday I showed you two Jeanie Sunday by the relative unknown artist Leon Winick. Later in the fifties Winick worked on a Dennis the Menace knock-of for publisher Stanmor. Funny enough, Gill Fox, his predesessor on Jeanie was at that time working on the Sunday only gag filler Bumper to Bumper for the Daily News in a similar (but much better accomplished) Ketcham-derived style.
As promised I also have more work by Howard "Howie" Post. In one interview he stated he packaged a funny comic for DC. I think he misremembered. In fact he packaged a book called Wonderland for publisher Stanmor in 1945 and 1946, whixh probably lead to his assignments for DC in 1946 and onwards into the forties.
Wonderland was clearly inspired by the succes of Walt Kelly's Fairy Tale Parade issues of Dell's Four Color series. Not only did Post ink his stories in a style inspired by Kelly, he also used Kelly' handinked panel borders and the subject of the book was funny fairy tales, just like kelly's. Half the stories in each issue were drawn by Post. He may have written or even sketched others. There were only eight issues. The cover of the seventh issue was one of the most Kelly-like. guess that either Post was asked to join the DC funny line based on that book or he went into the DC's offices himself and used it to get the new assignment. He immediately went to work on a new feature for New Fun. I showed the originals foir one of the stories a couple of months ago. Clearly DC paid better than Stanmor, because he obviously spent a lot more time on that series. He also took over Presto Pete, which isn't strange as he was doing a magician feature in Wonderland as well.
Here is the cover to Wonderland #7:
The cover to #3:
Two one page fillers which show Post's problem to me... he may have been an interesting artist, but he rally wasn't much of a writer. His biggest successes are when he is illustrating someone else's work, which I will illustrate in a couple of later posts. One day I will have to compare these to the one page filler Mother Goose Rhymes pages Walt Kelly did for Raggedy Ann and Andy for you.
The last one page filler is from Wonderland #8. This you can compare yourselve to the elephants in Kelly's Ellefunnies.
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