Tom Spurgeon does the kind of obit on Howard Post that I didn't have time to do yesterday. And Jerry Beck offers a little more about Howie's animation work. The AP obit says he died last Friday and had recently been hospitalized for kidney failure. So the cause of death may not have been Alzheimer's, but his close friend (and former studio-mate) Jack Mendelsohn told me that had been plaguing Howie the last year or so.
Let me throw into the record, two more thoughts about Post's career. A lot of fans probably know him best for Anthro, a book he did for DC in 1968-1969 which lasted only a half-dozen issues. During that period, a lot of great comics were introduced at DC that lasted about that long and I always thought it was a shame. At the time, Independent News — the division of the company that distributed their comics as well as other periodicals — was generally down on comic books. There was an unfortunate dynamic in play: If something new was introduced — invariably as a bi-monthly — and it didn't draw decent sales within two or three issues, it was declared a flop and hastily cancelled.
I'm not entirely certain whose pronouncement that was but I think it became self-fulfilling. It takes time for something genuinely new to become well-enough known that it attracts new readers to the point of purchase. If you put out one issue and then two months later, you put out another…and then two months later, you put out another one, that's just not enough of a test; not for anything that's truly different.
Maybe at one point in comic history, it was enough time…but by the late sixties, we had a generation that had been raised on TV and on entertainment that was always readily accessible. They didn't have the patience to follow long continuities in newspaper comic strips, which is why those died off. I don't think they had the patience to wait two months between issues of a comic book. One of the appeals of the Marvel line at that time was that the books were all monthly and they were all interconnected…so if you loved that world, you could go the newsstand every week and get a couple of fresh doses. If you were starting to fall for the world of Anthro, you had to wait way too long for the next visit.
And you weren't even sure there'd be one. This is all based on anecdotal evidence from my old Comic Book Club but I think that when DC got to cancelling so many good comics so quickly (Bat Lash, Creeper, Hawk & Dove, Secret Six and so on), they created a big problem for themselves. Readers learned not to get too interested in something new under the DC banner because that comic would probably not be around for long. Marvel was on the march. DC was in a state of perpetual retreat from its own advances.
No one can ever prove me wrong but I believe that if DC had kept a couple of those comics running for, say, two years on a monthly basis, they would have caught on big. The potential loss until that happened would not have been great. It's what in some businesses they call an "investment." You make them when you think the potential reward is great enough and likely enough. Anthro is a book on which I would have wagered. In fact, I would not have published it in the first place if I wasn't prepared to give it that kind of backing. It was a fun idea with an appealing premise and the characters and stories were strong…but it was something new, and people sometimes take a while to find or warm up to "new."
Admittedly, this is an arguable point. So is what happened with its last issue. Up until then, Howie had written and drawn it, and he drew in a kind of rough style that was perfectly apropos for a strip set in the Stone Age, when things were kinda rough. When DC got its first, disappointing sales returns, they thought they might be able to save the project by making the art slicker…so they had the last issue inked by the great Wally Wood.
This greatly changed the look and feel of the comic. It lost its rough feel and the female characters became awfully cute and sexy. Ordinarily, you might think this was a shrewd commercial move — and it might have been but for two things. One was that the comic was already dead by then. Last issues almost never turned things around. In fact, under the distribution system back then, you sometimes didn't even get accurate sales figures on a last issue…so if sales did shoot up, you'd never know for certain. And the other problem was that Howie Post, who was the heart and soul of Anthro, hated it. He looked at his comic, he told me, and his comic didn't look like his comic any longer, his characters weren't his characters. He said that once he realized what Wood was doing to it, he lost his enthusiasm for the project and it also took him much longer to pencil the comic than it previously had to both pencil and ink it.
This is an aspect of creation that the audience often doesn't think about, nor are they usually in any position to assess it. The environment in which a work is created — the mental attitude of the creators — that all has a lot to do with what emerges. Give me the best writer and artist in comics and if I treat them badly enough…or just cause them to be disoriented or dispirited…I can get lousy work out of them. Sometimes, that is the reason your favorite writer produced great, memorable writing in one venue and less-than-stellar material in another. Or why things were great for an extended period and then got lousy. Someone busted someone's chops.
So when I think about Howie Post, I think about Anthro and about the huge missed opportunity that, I think, it represented. That's one thing I wanted to say.
The other thing was about his newspaper strip, The Dropouts. As you probably know, syndicates sell strips to newspapers and the fee is based on the newspaper's circulation. So the goal is to sell to the largest paper in each city…or at least it was, back when most cities had more than one newspaper. These days, the goal seems to be to just sell the strip, period. The Dropouts was purchased by the L.A. Times at a time when it was, I believe, the third-largest newspaper in the country…and since The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal didn't carry comics, that was the best sale you could make.
But what frustrated Howie was that though the L.A. Times paid for his strip, they often didn't run it. The Dropouts was their "drop-in" strip. They'd run it for three months, then omit it for six, then run it for eight more, then drop it for a year, then bring it back for a week. It was a space filler when some other strip was unavailable. When Doonesbury started, before it established its clout and popularity, there were occasional instances when the Times didn't want to run some sequence. Into its place for one week only would go The Dropouts.
Howie's strip was also the "control" in the occasional experiment. For several years, the Times comic strip editors attempted to improve their page via the following strategy: They'd drop some strip that they thought didn't have much of a following and see how many letters and calls of complaint they received. And what would they put in its place while they ran this little test? The Dropouts, of course.
But The Dropouts was never in serious contention for a permanent slot, Howie told me. If enough protests came in from lovers of the departed strip, it would come back and they'd drop The Dropouts. If they didn't get a significant number of complaints, they'd bring in something else and drop The Dropouts. Either way, Howie's strip was forever reverting to Student Stand-by status. He was happy with the ongoing checks — at one point, I think he was paid for a whole year without ever once seeing print in the Times — but bothered that he was being treated as a placeholder.
The first time I met him was in New York in 1970. When he heard I was from Los Angeles, his eyes lit up and he made me an offer that he apparently made then to anyone who lived in the Times' circulation area: If I'd write a letter to the Times and ask to have The Dropouts appear every day — including the Sunday page, which I don't think the paper ever ran — he'd send me an original strip. l wrote but it didn't do any good. (Years later when I met someone who worked in that division at the Times, I asked why they didn't just run it in the classified ad section or somewhere else when there was no place for it on the funnies page. The answer had something to do with the bureaucracy in the company. Other sections had other editors and no one could infringe on their turfs.)
The strip ended in '82. The AP obit (linked above) says it was in "more than 100 newspapers." That's not a lot unless one of them is paying what the L.A. Times pays. I have no inside info on this but I'm wondering if that's when the Times stopped paying for it. That drop in income would probably have made it no longer worth his time to draw or the syndicate's to syndicate. Anyway, Howie's timing was pretty good because it was around then that he was tapped to write for the Richie Rich cartoon show…and about the time that gig ended, Marvel launched his kids' line and he was hired, probably by former Harvey editor Sid Jacobsen, to draw many of them. Howie Post was never without work for very long…a testimony to his talent and versatility.
