The adventures of Alex, Jimminy and Howie

 Continuing the occasional series of blog posts about the early comics work of the writers of the classic Thundercats cartoon (which really can't continue much further than this, because once you've done Bob Haney and Leonard Starr, you've basically run out of material), let's talk about the earliest works of Howard Post!

Well, he's credited with writing two episodes of Thundercats, and although I'll eat my hat if the second of them, "Return of the Driller", wasn't almost entirely written by Peter Lawrence, I think we can be sure that Howard was responsible for "Spitting Image", at least. And they're both great episodes!

Born in 1926, Howard Post got into the comics business when still in his teens, in 1945. He was the central attraction of Wonderland Comics, from Prize Publications, drawing the covers and the lead story "Alex in Wonderland".

Alex is a boy who refuses to believe anything, who finds himself transported to Wonderland along with a talking macaw sidekick and finds a magical land populated by nursery rhyme characters who persist in not doing the things that the nursery rhymes say they should do. Alex sets out on a campaign to force them all to behave properly and save the children of the world from having to learn new rhymes.

The first story has a writing credit to Jerry Gale; subsequent ones just have one of Howie Post's signatures (he varies between "Post", "Howard Post" and "Howard W. Post"), and since they're basically the same story every time we can maybe assume the artist was also the writer. Wonderland Comics was cancelled after nine issues, but the artwork had evolved and improved over that time until it had become a very proficient Walt Kelly impersonation, perfectly suited to the nursery rhyme theme. And it clearly caught the attention of the big-name publisher DC, in their latest quest to find a new Superman to catch the public imagination and restore their flagging sales!

Yes, this is the new character who was going to rank alongside Superman, Batman and the Boy Commandos. Making his debut in More Fun Comics #121 (cover dated April 1947), it's Jimminy and the Magic Book! DC absolutely flooded their comics with ads for Jimminy! Nobody who picked up any comic in 1947 could have failed to be aware what was happening in More Fun, DC's earliest and longest-running title, going all the way back to the very dawn of American comic books (it was called New Fun when it started up). The title's long history had given the world many classic characters over the years, even if it never quite topped the sales charts, and could our new hero be the one to take it to new heights in the post-war era?

Jimminy is basically just Alex. He's a bit smaller, and he's got a magic book rather than a magic macaw, but it's essentially the exact same thing. Beautiful artwork, though, and Prize could hardly complain about the plagiarism - one of the back-up strips of Wonderland Comics, called "Neighbors", was a carbon copy of the Fox and the Crow, the Columbia cartoon characters who DC had paid good money for the comic rights to!

There were not one but two Jimminy stories in each issue of More Fun, just to really cement him in the readers' minds as the new big thing. Or maybe DC were really short of material and Howard Post was able to draw an impressive number of very detailed pages every month (he also drew some funny-animal strips for them at the same time). But one nice feature of the stories is that Jimminy is a legacy hero - the magic book has been passed down through the generations of his family, as he's told by his father (who says 'ye' instead of 'you', but otherwise seems to be more or less sane and reliable). I'm sure that there are descendants of the Crockett family out there today, having magic adventures and just waiting for someone to put them in the comics!

Nothing bad can possibly have happened to the heroes or the book, as Jimminy's mother points out with an impressive certainty at the end of the first story...

But somehow, Jimminy and the Magic Book didn't catch the imagination. More Fun Comics was cancelled with #127, and burnt off the entire inventory in that final issue - FIVE adventures for Jimminy in that one comic! Another advert had Superboy and Robin showing their support for the hero, perhaps hoping the readers would buy his comic in such quantities as to save it from oblivion. But clearly they didn't, and that was the end of More Fun.

Certainly not the end of Howard Post, though, who had a lengthy and successful career both in comics with Harvey and animation with Paramount / Famous Studios. And, of course, those two episodes of Thundercats!