Howie Post's Attributes

Howie Post is by far my favorite Harvey comics cartoonist. He has the most fun style. It's like he is caricaturing the Harvey house style and bringing out all its best elements.

Appeal

"Appeal" is more than just a principle. To me it's the sum of the other fundamental skills. It's controlling your visual skills in a way that makes the result the most enjoyable and exciting to look at.

For me, without appeal a cartoon is not worth watching or reading. It's the appeal that first grabs your attention and draws you in to the story, to see if there is anything else that's worth your time. I know that's very old-fashioned thinking. When I was a kid, it went without saying. You read the comics and read the cartoons first because they were fun to look at. If they were ugly, you wouldn't get far enough in to find out if they had other attributes.

Howie Post has tons of appeal. Real eye candy.

Great Backgrounds

His backgrounds are cartoony, stylish and inventive. Oh... and bold!

Design and Style

He has the strongest graphic style of any of the Harvey cartoonists.

Composition

His compositions are not only totally clear functionally - they go much farther than that; they are designs in themselves.

Cartooniness

His characters are very cartoony. It's rare to see strong style and cartooniness working so seamlessly together.

Poil

Actually all the girls Howie draws are very cute. Poil, Audrey, Wendy, Lucretia and the rest.

Imagination

Howie's stories have some really magical characters and designs.

I'm going to do some posts on each of these aspects of Howie's work.