Howie Post started out as a Walt Kelly imitator. His stories about young boys and their magic elephants were so much like that of the later Pogo creator, that Dell actually approached him to take over the Fairy Tales comic book series, when Kelly left. Instead Post directed his energies elsewhere, doing work for several publishers in the late forties and early fifties, before landing at Harvey, where he had a solid career as one of their most important creators. Along the way, Post also worked for Stan Lee at Timely Atlas in various forms. His first important contribution was when he took over the girl teen strip Nellie the Nurse. Written by Stan Lee, most of the stories were an excuse to string together as many dumb jokes as possible. Something Stan Le was really good at and did with lots of success for My Friend Irma (drawn by Dan DeCarlo) for more than twelve years. Nellie the Nurse was not as big a hit and disappeared after a couple of issues. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get these days. I have one copy out of the more then ten Post did and I have found just as few online. Here are two of the Nellie the Nurse stories anyway, followed by a horror story by Post from a few years later. My feeling is that Post wrote most of his material for Stan Lee himself, certainly after the Nellie the Nurse years. He seems to have either adopted a quick and easy style of just done the job very quickly for those.
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