"And now that you know about Howie's cat, you can confirm the unconfirmed for Who's Who In American Comics."
You see, they list Howie Post as possibly having done work for Jason Comic Art Studios, but that this is unconfirmed. Not particularly surprising since all their work was delivered under the JCA signature. But Howie had his stick figure cat to mark his work, as seen here -
As you can see from that first panel, Howie clearly did do work for the JCA studio. But perhaps this example is 'forgotten' today due to some of the rather uncomfortable World War II era character representations featured in the story. Better to remember the past than to bury, forget, and repeat it - that's my general thinking. So let's continue, but remember that Howie was a newbie working his way up in the studios and remember the cultural time frame.
A bit of a side note here - it was popular at the time to see any ethnic group as a basic source of comedy just by the fact that they were different. This led to a variety of Mexican/Latino, Eskimo, and Asian characters who leaned heavily into stereotypes as the source of comedy.
Oddly enough, a lot of them ran in the Funny Animal comics proliferating at the time. Make of that what you will.
This feels like an awfully short post, so let's jump ahead a couple years to look at a strip that Howie did for Funny Folks. The food pun named Chick 'n Gumbo followed a pair of
hmm... shall we call them peasants? It's hard to pin down just what sort of world they lived in - medieval, with giants and ... tigers? It's an Odd little world. The strip had only 5 appearances, and they got the obvious joke out of the way in the first episode -
Let's do one more to round out a trio of comics for this post. We'll follow along to the second tale so that my previous comment might make more sense -
Well, i don't know about Gumbo, but i'm heading off to sleep.
page art by Howie Post for Jamboree #1 and Funny Folks #s 16 & 17 (1946, 1948)
