Post Haste

Friday Comic Book Day.

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.

Whoa Nellie

Friday Comic Book Day.

I haven't done a lot of Howie Post lately, so here are a fw storie from Nurse Nellie #32. We do not only get the whip 'em out graphics of Mr. Post, but also the equally quick and easy humor of Stan Lee. Together they did quite a few of these books, which are rarer and more expensive than you would expect. After looking for them every now and then on e-bay, I have not managed to get three of them and only one readyscanned.

Post Post Post

Monday Remembrance Special

For the third time this month we interrupt our regular schedule for a showing of some lesser known material of a recently deceased comic book artist. Mark Evanier and several blog note the passing of Howie Post at age 83. I have been preparing a larger overview of his work for some time now, but since a lot of that material is from my own collection, it takes a lot of scanning.

A overview of the highlights of his career can be found at Mark Evanier's blog at www.newsfromme.com. Here is my condensed version with some bits added.

Howie Post seems to have started working immediately after the war. His first work were some animal and fairy tale stories for DC, that were heavily inspired by the work and style of Walt Kelly in Dell's Fairy Tale Parade. I think I have shown one of those here already. I particulary like his huckster rabit Presto Pete. Some people have reported that he wrote his own material and that seems pretty likely. It also seems that, like Walt Kelly, he wrote as he drew the story.

He continued his career as a Walt Kelly imitator by creating the title Wonderland, a knock-off of Fairy Tale Parade, which ran for quite a few issues. Unlike Kelly, he drew almost all of every issue and may even have written the rest.

I recently came across yet aother sample of his work in the same genre and style in Ziff Davis' Nusery Rhymes and Fairy Tales books at the end of the forties/beginning of the fifties. Here he slowly moves away from the Kelly style and comes into his own, which is even loser and seems to have been drawn even faster than Kelly's.

Nursery Rhymes #2:




Fairy Tales #11:


Nursery Rhymes #10:















Arond the same time he joined up with Stan Lee at Timely/Atlas and started drawing Nellie the Nurse, one of Lee's 'dumb blonde' series. This time the blonde is a readhead. The scripts are written by Lee, with some of the one-pagers unsigned, but they seem like typical Lee gags to me. Later in the fifties Post drew Monkey and Bear for Lee and this time he seems to have written them himself. At the same time he also wrote and drew a couple of stories for Stan Lee's Mad imitations (hidiously improvised and barely funny) as well as a couple of horror stories. His style gets looser and loser until it's no less than a scratchy and sketchy ghost of it's potential.

Nellie the Nurse #32:


Money and the Bear #2:






Monkey and the Bear #2:


But when he turns up at Harvey, drawing the devil character Little Hot Stuff, he starts delivering some prime, well inked stories that are justly admired by a lot of cartoonists today (including John Kricfalusi, so watch out for a retrospective on his blog). Mark Evanier also mentions work for DC's Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis series. I am not particulary knwoledgable about those, but my guess is this must have been in the later period. I will have a look-out for them.

In the early sixties he is reported to have been the head of Paramount's animation studio, so again you can expect very little nformation about that from me. But I do have a large run of Sundays from his late sixties/early seventies newspaper strip The Dropouts, which I will share at a later date. But for now, here are some black and white ones.

Dec 1 1974:


Dec 8 1974: