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:

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Friday Comic Book Day.

Those of you who have read my article in Alter Ego #86 will know that I think Howie Post wrote his own material in Stan Lee's Mad imitations Riot, Wild and Crazy and that I find it quite poor both story- and art-wise. Infact I think everything Howard Post did for Timely (as Marvel was then called by most porfessionels) is below the standard of the rest of his work. It may not have helped that he wrote it himself, or maybe he just thought the paid too little. Here re two samples of other stuff he did for Timely. A 'horror' story for Marvel Tales, which shows his scratchy 'serious' style. And the lead story plus a one page gag from Monkey and the Bear #3. Monkey and the Bear was an attempt at a kid animal book. Som eof those were stilling pretty well in the mid-fifties, so ~ guess Martin Goodman ordered Stan Lee to create one as well and Stan turned to Post, who had been know for that sort of thing in the previous decade. Or Post came in with the book and sold it to them, I don't know. I know there are several people on the internet who think everything Post did is just wonderfully designed, but I fail to see the qualities in this. I don't even like the design of the characters.










From Marvel Tales #131:

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..