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!
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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-