Ponytail #3

History

Lee Holley launched the Ponytail daily cartoon panel on November 7, 1960, through King Features Syndicate, after selling early Ponytail cartoons to Teen Magazine in August of that year; a Sunday strip followed on January 7, 1962. Dell Comics began publishing the comic book adaptation in 1962, and unlike the publisher's typical approach with licensed properties, Holley oversaw most of the comic book production himself, with Frank Hill and others (including Bob Gustafson and Dave Berg) providing additional art and writing support. Issue #3, dated August 1963, falls squarely in this early, creator-supervised phase of the Dell run, which continued through 1965 before the series was eventually revived at Charlton Comics from 1969 to 1971.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published August 1963 by Dell Comics as the third issue of the Ponytail ongoing series (cover and interior by Lee Holley and Frank Hill).
• Ponytail Johnson and her boyfriend Donald Dawson — the strip's two central characters, named in part after Holley's own real-life brother Donald — both appear throughout the issue's anthology of short humor stories.
• Confirmed story titles in this issue include 'Low Down Trick,' 'Palsy Walsy,' 'Tele-Wise,' 'Beautiful But Not So Dumb,' 'Secret Admirer,' 'Honey and Vinegar,' 'Cassie: Phoney,' and 'Poodle Doodle,' each a self-contained gag strip in the tradition of the original newspaper panel.
• Story premises in this issue reflect early-1960s suburban teenage life: Ponytail's mother tries to become her 'pal,' the family's new TV set turns the house into a social hub, and Ponytail is mistaken for a genius.
• The Dell comic book series ran from 1962 to 1965 (originating under the Ponytail 1962 series designation) and was one of only a handful of Dell titles from the post-Western-Publishing era to sustain a run of 20 issues across both publishers.
• Creator Lee Holley, a former Warner Bros. animator and Hank Ketcham ghostwriter, maintained unusual creative control over the Dell comics — a rarity for the publisher, which typically handed licensed properties to in-house teams.
• The Ponytail strip on which the comic was based ran in roughly 300 newspapers at its peak and continued until October 16, 1988, giving the Dell-era comics a long afterlife in the source material even after the comic series ended.
• Since 2010, classic Ponytail strip episodes have been translated and adapted for the Dutch girls' magazine Tina by writer Thom Roep, representing the property's only notable international adaptation.

Cast · 2 characters

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