Howie Post, Tree King

Nate, pay attention!


I love Howie Post's backgrounds. They are caricatures of the general Harvey house style. You notice right away how interesting the details are-the shapes of the trees, the creative bark textures, the clever and stylish shapes of the leaves.

But details don't make a good picture!

LARGE NEGATIVE SHAPES

DRAW YOUR EYE TO THE

POSITIVE SHAPES THEY SURROUND.

SPACE AROUND THE MAIN OBJECTS

What makes the individual objects read especially well is his use of not only the shapes themselves, but the spaces surrounding the shapes, and the spaces within the shapes.

SMALLER SUB FORMS WITHIN THE NEGATIVE SPACES
(MORE SPACE THAN SUB-FORMS)

He doesn't fill a whole tree evenly with bark textures. Note that some areas have bark details close together - but these clumps of texture are separated by other clumps with ample spaces in between.

The characters are always clearly framed by the bgs and the negative spaces between the characters.

The empty spaces are just as pleasingly designed as the positive shapes of the characters and objects.

All the details are small and in organic (non-mathematical) proportions. That's so the details don't draw your attention away from the much larger forms that they wrap around.
He has an infinite amount of ways to draw leaves, without having to draw each individual leaf.


Sometimes his foliage looks like it's from another planet.

Post uses hierarchy of forms and spaces beautifully. All those girls running towards Hot Stuff fit within a flowing organic shape. Plus, they are not evenly spaced. That makes it appear natural, even though Howie is completely controlling the image.

Again, besides marvelling at the beautiful cartoony tree, look at how much negative space there is - both:

1) Surrounding the tree

2) Within the details of the tree. (Nate!)

Each layer of sub forms describes a clear and distinct form, which is in turn subject to the larger form it wraps around.

HOT STUFF REPRINTS

Howie Post and new department in my Amazon store

Boy do I love Howie Post! He has all my favorite traits in a cartoonist:

APPEAL/CUTENESS!

This is probably #1 on my list. Although to be able to draw with appeal, you have to understand some principles and then on top of that just have a natural knack for cuteness.



He even draws ugly characters with appeal. Like Basil Wolverton.

All His Principles

Good construction, line of action, clear clean poses, unambiguous attitudes.

LIFE!

His characters are very lively. Even his props and bgs are. Many artists have trouble with this essential element of cartoons. I see a lot of cartoonists whose characters seem to be sleepwalking, just going through the motions, merely obeying the script. Of course that is encouraged by today's styles, but I don't understand it. No sir, I don't like it.

He's the one with the cartooniest animals.

DESIGN AND CREATIVITY

Howie has a great natural sense of design and balance. He really knows how to use negative spaces to point to the positive spaces. He tries lots of interesting shapees and textures, all very cartoony and fun.

Look how great these silhouettes are! They still read perfectly and have tons of life and attitude - plus being extreme design statements.

Howie's skills are immense and the really amazing thing about the skills is that he is able to balance them all at the same time. Ask my layout artists how hard that is to do!

Not only is each panel a well thought out technical composition, the whole page is balanced as a single overall artistic whole.

These are true works of art.

HOWIE IS KING OF CARTOON TREES

He is so good at designing trees, that I'm going to devote a whole post to it for our lovers of good cartoon backgrounds.

Here's a later comic page by Post. It still has all the principles but is a bit less cartoony. By the mid 60s, just about everyone was getting lesss lively in the arts. Tiredness was setting into American culture and now, 40 years later we are totally lethargic.

I found this article about Howie at Pappy's fantastic comics blog.
http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2007/09/number-188-not-quite-kelly-howie-post.html



It turns out that Howie had a period of heavy Walt Kelly influence, which totally makes sense.



http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/05post.html


Where can you get your hands on some killer Howie Post art?

Well luckily for all of us, Jerry Beck and Leslie Cabarga have been compiling classic Harvey comics into big collections, published by Dark Horse.

HOT STUFF REPRINTS

Like all cartoon books, the stuff you really are buying the book for is not as abundant as you would like and they always go too far past the golden age of good stuff. I've never been able to figure out why.

Here's an open request to Jerry and Leslie: Please put out a whole book of Howie's best stuff from the 50s and early 60s! From all the Harvey comics he worked on: Little Audrey, Spooky, Nightmare, Hot Stuff and anything else he did.

I'm looking forward to the Audrey book that's coming out but just found out it has Little Lotta and Dot in it too, and I remember that stuff being drawn by the poorest Harvey artist. It's too bad, because they were potentially fun characters. Were they ever drawn by the good artists?

I never knew the names of the Harvey artists, but I could tell the different styles:

The fun cartoony guy (Howie)
The early animator guy. (early 50s Harvey comics)
The mean guy with realistic adults with tiny heads (A lot of Richie Rich and all the characters by the mid to late 60s)
The crummy guy (Little Dot)

The other early guy with style:Who is this, Jerry?

Oh and here's another bonus: they printed the color stuff right. They just scanned the original comics, instead of recoloring them in photoshop. They still have all the 4 color dot patterns that make up the different colors and the lines are intact - unlike say, the Marvel reprints that have lost a lot of the original detail in the linework and have flat ugly colors now.

By the way folks, I added a department in my Amazon store for good cartoon comics and books so check it out. Lots of great inspiring stuff there!

BUY SOME GREAT CLASSIC COMICS HERE!

Later today or tomorrow, Howie's trees!
__________________________________________________________

Hi John,

Enjoyed your post about Howie Post. I'm a big fan of Post too.

Here's a capsule description of some of the other artists you may have been wondering about...

Sid Couchy- Little Lotta and Little Dot... the simple guy

Martin B. Taras- Baby Huey, Buzzy, Wendy the Witch... Neatest draughtsman... his Huey and Buzzy stories look like they are moving. He was more restrained on Wendy.

Steve Mufatti- Early Harvey artist who became the model artist. He snuck cool design shapes into his work. Left Harvey in 1958 to work for Joe Oriolo on Felix.

Milton Stein- Friend of Post. Stein put some way out designs into his settings.

Dave Tendlar- Baby Huey, Herman and Catnip... Drew in a rounder and wavier style than Taras. See Tendlar's Fleischer cartoons, and the style will seem instantly familiar.

Warren Kramer- Stumbo, Casper... Sid Jacobson's favorite...at first he was trying to emulate Mufatti, but he was more conservative. Became even more conservative later.

Ernie Colon- Richie Rich, Casper... Jacobson's other favorite. Tends to vere off into almost illustration style proportions.

Milton Knight is actually the biggest expert I know on the Harvey artists, and he even worked with Post and several of the others. He knows more than I do about them.

Best,

MK-

Howie Post, the cartoony Harvey artist

Harveytoons had a very appealing house style. It's generic but cute. Almost all their kid stars were the same design.I'm not sure who did this really cute cover...Warren Kremer?

Casper is Elmer Fudd without ears. He is a living dead construction model- the ultimate bland!
Spooky is Casper with a dognose and freckles. And he's a smartass bully.
Audrey is Casper with a dress and hair.
So is Dot.
Hot Stuff has pointy ears and horns.

Richie has cashWhich character doesn't belong?

HOWIE POST

When I was a kid there was one Harvey artist I loved. I thought of him as "the fun one".Jerry Beck later told me it was Howie Post. He did the 1950s Spooky and Little Audrey comics. He continued in the 60s but someone else started to take over.
Howie not only drew the most likable versions of the characters, he did the nicest backgrounds too. His haunted forests were great!
These examples are actually a little later than the most cartoony stuff he did. I found these online, but I have a stack of 50s Harvey comics somewhere and as soon as I find them I'll post some.

I always thought the comics were drawn better than most of the animated cartoons.

Just for comparison sake, here are the same characters drawn by Ernie Colon. Not so cute. Kinda serious looking. (This is also a bit later)

Colon is obviously a good draftsman and he must have been fast, because he did tons of titles all through the 60s, and I read 'em all.
He's not as appealing and not at all cartoony though. He also has a tendency to draw the characters mean.Colon did this weird thing that confused me when I was little. He would combine regular bighead Harvey kids with little head incidental characters. Tiny close set eyes even on the kids.

The adults had heads that were a quarter the size of the kids' heads! Check out your collection of Richie Rich comics and get creeped out! The adults are a different species than the kids!

Sometimes he made the kids positively demonic.Audrey could use an exorcism!

Howie Post's cute Audrey.

Compare the proportions of her features in Post's design to the Colon one.
Her eyes are bigger, wider apart and set on angles.

Howie's caveboy Melvin




Here are some more great covers from the 50s. Kremer?



The earliest comics looked more like the cartoons:

So you might be wondering, "Why do you like these characters if they are generic and bland?"

Well Casper is very bland indeed and I didn't like him as much as the other characters. But the stories were about magical impossible stuff happening and that was good enough for a reading or 2. The other characters have a bit of personality and much appeal when in the hands of appealing artists.

These are for kids and have simple stories with simple personalities and I'm completely fine with that - as long as they look fun! And they aren't pretending to be anything more than that. I never heard the artists (or writers!) telling us about the great acting and storylines - although I'd say they were still ahead of animated features on both scores. They were silly and sincere. Fun throwaway entertainment. A classic American tradition.

They also were done very cheap. You could buy a fist full of these comics for a buck and still have money left over for smokes and cokes. Generic and silly for 10 cents makes more sense to me than generic and hard on the eyes for $100,000,000 or more. Plus the Harvey style didn't squeeze every other style out of business. There was a lot of variety in comics and cartoons back then.



If you're gonna do simple and soft for kids, an appealing visual style can do a lot for a lack of "deep" content.

These look like they are drawn by someone who never grew up and is still immature, silly and playful. He'd let you stay up past your bedtime and eat big helpings of ice cream.

Howie Post's really cute and lively drawing style gave the comics a light hearted and imaginative personality.

I liked the early cartoony Harvey comics but didn't care too much for the late 60s comics when they started looking too serious and the style got dreary and less cartoony.
These look like they are drawn by an intelligent mature man who always balances his checkbook. He'd be sure you got to bed on time and finished your cauliflower.

It's amazing how different artists can bring such different feelings to the same designs and material.

Harvey comics is a naturally cute style.

I'm saddened by the realization that the concept of cute and appeal may be lost forever.

Look what happens to a once cute style today when really serious people get a hold of it.

These folks would make you go to church every day of the week!

Did you know that there is a huge difference between "Design" and "Style"?

I was thinking about doing a post on that, but it'll take some work.