An Interview with Lee Holley (Hogan's Alley #7, 1999)

The names Lee Holley and Ponytail will strike a familiar chord with only two groups: very dedicated comic strip students and baby boomers who remember Holley’s 1960s teenage comic-strip character. His 35 years as a Warner Bros. studio animator, magazine cartoonist, Dennis the Menace ghost, comic-book artist and syndicated strip cartoonist stand as an example of the quiet but sustained rewards cartooning can endow upon the enterprising artist possessing skillful timing and a love for the medium. Sometimes simultaneously producing two or three syndicated comic strips while working commercial and comic-book accounts, at his peak Holley remains a favored candidate for comics’ busiest pen of the 1960s and ’70s but ironically remains one of the most neglected, since so much of his work was in a studio production setting or as a ghost artist. (It’s safe to say that a good many readers of this magazine have doubtless seen Holley’s skillful work without realizing it.) Coupled with his independent and nomadic lifestyle and a disdain for the self-promotion that made contemporary colleagues household names, the recipe for anonymity is complete. Detailed biographical material on Lee Holley is simply nonexistent, consisting solely of sketchy thumbnail blurbs in vintage National Cartoonists Society yearbooks. This may be the reason neither Lee Holley nor Ponytail have warranted inclusion in comics histories nor his animation contributions recorded in genre studies.

This is Lee Holley’s first formal interview, which was sandwiched into a very active lifestyle that includes flying his own plane, tournament tennis, long-distance marathon running and frequent travel. It’s difficult to imagine this dynamic sportsman who appears a decade younger than his 66 years spending more than half of his life quietly hunched over a drawing board animating or drawing comic strips. Hindsight being 20/20, today Lee may be considered comics’ answer to Nostradamus: He predicted in the late 1960s today’s diminishing readership, so he vigorously pursued alternative career development in case Ponytail ever foundered. Throughout his career, Lee Holley’s timing remained uncanny no matter the project, be it animation during Warner Bros.’ salad days of the 1950s, or as Hank Ketcham’s trusted lieutenant on Dennis the Menace during the feature’s greatest fame, or investments in the financial enterprises that made him a multimillionaire. Holley left comics with Ponytail’s 1989 demise, and he never looked back. But he remains both very warmly remembered and respected by his former cartooning colleagues and a classic American success story. His sense of timing was evident in early 1960, when he pitched the semiautobiographical teenage strip he’d nurtured since high school to King Features Syndicate. King chose Ponytail for syndication in response to an emerging teen market and to nurture a youthful comic strip audience that idolized Tuesday Weld, Ricky Nelson and Sandra Dee. Looking back at vintage ’60s Ponytail panels, readers can today appreciate them as pure American Graffiti—the gags bring the same nostalgic rush that thumbing through your high school annual does. Just as Harold Teen captured the youthful zeitgeist in the 1920s and Archie in the ’40s and ’50s, Lee Holley’s Ponytail is a cartoon snapshot of the ’60s.
No one knew then that the strip was comics’ farewell to the genre of strips featuring teeny-boppers sipping sodas, getting pinned, riding in jalopies and worrying about prom dates. Cynics may deride this as a fantasy past, but Holley assures us it really happened, that indeed such a time once existed. Ponytail is a delightful time machine that Lee Holley helmed, returning us to those happy days where the Twist, the 15-cent hamburger and the hula hoop are alive and well.

John Province: Lee, locating you was a three-year ordeal. What have you been doing since Ponytail ended in 1989?

Lee Holley: The only change is that I stopped drawing the panel, but I’ve carried on everything I had been doing before that. I’ve led an anonymous life, but it’s been fun and exciting. In the late ’60s I realized that, though I was in a fun profession, it wasn’t going to go on forever. My wife and I became interested in real estate and began investing in areas we lived in at the time: North Shore of Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, Monterey and Santa Cruz, holding the properties for the long term.
The past 10 years, I’ve also invested in the technology sector of the stock market, so by the time Ponytail had run its course, I had the peace of mind knowing we were financially secure. I’ve been as successful in real estate and the stock market as I was with the comic strip, so I have a very good feeling about that. I was able to do the comic strip—and I think I was very fortunate in that—but it became almost a means to an end. I was paid very well and was interested in maintaining the lifestyle I had become accustomed to. My wife, Tricia, is a former Pan Am stewardess from England, and we enjoy traveling. I fly my own plane and my hobby is imported sports cars, so I had to think of a way to continue that [laughter].

Province: Did you end Ponytail or did the syndicate? Were you losing papers?

Holley: Eventually I was, but these thing have a life to them. They build, reach a peak and eventually peter out. I realized I wasn’t doing an Archie that was going to outlive its creator. I had about 300 papers for most of the run, and I learned that panels didn’t stay fixed the way strips did. They float around and appear in different places and that’s how you lose your readership. Bill Yates called me. He’d taken Sylvan Byck’s place as comics editor at King Features. He was very nice but said, “Lee, I’ve been looking at the client list, and it’s not what it once was—how are you fixed?” [laughter]. I knew it was coming and said, “Bill, there’s nothing you need to be concerned about. If you want to pull the plug it’s OK with me.” I was down to around $20,000 a year and didn’t need a dime of it. The strip didn’t take much time, so I’d just kept doing it.

Province: That sounds like an approach apparent in several prominent strips today: Just keep riding the horse until it drops dead.

Holley: Unfortunately, it’s the mentality you almost have to have. The business is changing. Anyone who thinks this thing is going to go on until the day they die is fooling themselves. I always tried to plan ahead in growing up during the Depression from a very poor family. If you ever read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, that’s how my family came to California: in an old car from Oklahoma and Texas, right out of the Dust Bowl. I grew up working the orchards and fields after school and during the summer months. My earliest recollections are traveling back and forth from the Imperial Valley into Arizona picking produce. Until the third grade, I would have to leave and relocate and start school somewhere else. I remember sleeping on World War I army cots on dirt floors in tents lit by Coleman lanterns. This is at times how I lived as a child. Until World War II started and my dad got a steady job, I was that Okie kid in overalls.
I guess I have something of a complex about it, but I was determined that I was going to be something someday. I admired my parents. There was no welfare. They just worked hard, made their own clothes, all of that stuff. My parents certainly had no money to give me, so I had to make my own and I loved to do this thing called “cartooning” that appeared in the paper.

Province: Your interest in cartooning was from childhood, then.

Holley: That’s all I ever did as a kid: always sketching, always doodling. I had no real interest in academics.
I was taking art and getting C’s, because I didn’t want to draw flowers in vases. During my junior year, a man came into class and told the teacher he needed a student to draw cartoons. He had just bought a hamburger place and needed someone to paint murals of teenagers in jalopies and other high school scenes. He’d pay me $100 and buy all the paint. Would I be interested? I sure was! That was a lot
of money! For months I was on a scaffold painting kids in their hot rods, playing basketball, sharing a milkshake with two straws. It caught on and I was getting commissions from sporting goods stores and hobby shops. It was pretty primitive stuff, but I was getting an opportunity to express myself and getting paid. I started doing work for the yearbook. When I got out of high school and went into the Navy, I carried the idea with me of creating a comic strip.

Province: Did you continue cartooning in the Navy?

Holley: I was an Aviation Ordinance man working on the flight deck of a carrier during the Korean War and drew cartoons in my spare time. I worked on my first character, Seaman Duce, when I wasn’t working on bombs and rockets.
I had a little studio set up in one corner of a compartment and drew for Our Navy and All Hands, the Navy publications. They paid $2 each, but the money didn’t matter because my work was seen all over the world on all the ships and bases. It was the first time I was allowed to really cut loose. When I got out of the Navy, I had a portfolio with quite a bit of stuff and went directly to Chouinard on the G.I. Bill. I got into T. Hee’s cartooning classes, the artist from Disney. It was my favorite class.

Province: You had a teacher in high school you mentioned before as a source of inspiration.

Holley: Her name was Jane O’Farrell and she really encouraged me. A teacher can change your life, they really can, just by encouraging a student.

Province: Marc Davis taught life-drawing and advanced-movement classes at Chouinard as well. Did you take any of his courses?

Holley: Yes. I just marveled at his skill. It used to blow me away to just sit and watch him draw. Of all the people I’ve known in this business, I think he was the most talented of all. He helped me a lot and so did T. Hee, Hawley Pratt and Virgil Ross, highly skilled professionals who took the time to give me encouragement and lead me through the process.

Province: So many Disney animators came from Chouinard. Was there a general consensus that students there were pursuing an animation career?

Holley: There were two schools in Los Angeles at the time. One of them was the Art Center, which is where you went to become a commercial artist. I went over and they were drawing cars and serious illustration for advertising. I saw some very talented people. I went to Chouinard and they had fine art, but cartooning and animation as well. They didn’t call it animation per se, but with all of the Disney people who taught there, the influence was certainly felt.

Province: You didn’t get into comic strips right away like you wanted, but rather wound up at Warner Bros. as an animator. How did that come about?

Holley: Willie Ito was in one of my classes at Chouinard and had worked at Disney as an inbetweener, and he suggested I try to get a job there. Disney had just finished Lady and the Tramp but asked me to come back when they started Sleeping Beauty. In the meantime I went to Warner Bros., showed them my portfolio and they hired me. I was an inbetweener for a couple of months when they moved me into Friz Freleng’s unit as an assistant to Virgil Ross. While I was there Friz won three Oscars, and I got to work on all of the films; Knighty Knight Bugs, Bird Anonymous and Speedy Gonzales. I also worked on the This Is It! number you’ve probably seen on TV, with Bugs and Daffy and all the characters marching across the stage. I assisted on that for Virgil and Gerry Chiniquy. Warner was just getting into TV when I left to work for Hank Ketcham.

Province: I was lucky to get to know Virgil very well the last 10 years of his life. The fans’ adoration always seemed to catch him off guard.

Holley: Neat guy. He was a great animator, very quiet and low key. Virgil worked real rough, and my job was to clean it up. I’d worked hard at it for years. The animators from that era really couldn’t draw well, but they could animate like gangbusters. The guys who could draw and animate usually became directors.

Province: You’re right. I’m always amazed at the former sign painters who became truly legendary animators.

Holley: It’s a different art. I wasn’t an “A” animator; I was a “B” animator. That was the union’s designation, and thus I didn’t receive screen credit. I would have received screen credit for the next picture before I went to work for Hank, but I was in fact animating for Friz the last six months I was there. It was based on the amount of footage you animated each week. I was still learning.

Province: Did you work for any of the other directors besides Friz?

Holley: I worked on What’s Opera, Doc? for Chuck Jones, where Elmer is singing, “Kill the wabbit!” Ken Harris did the animation and I did the cleanup. I found out later that Chuck asked for me and another fellow to help on it because we could draw so well.

Province: Would you have been content to continue a career in animation if the chance to assist on Dennis had not come along?

Holley: I loved working at Warner Bros., but you can’t compare the two, considering the great freedom that comes with being a strip cartoonist. I preferred to be self-employed and work out of my home. If I had stayed at Warner I would have developed my skills as an animator until they folded up in 1964. By then I would have had the training to move into TV animation. My dream in high school was to work for Walt Disney. I think that was every kid’s dream who wanted to be a cartoonist. Sure, I had the comic strip idea, but Disney was something everyone could relate to.

Province: But two completely different approaches. One went for art and the other went strictly for laughs.

Holley: Even if Disney had hired me, I more than likely would have wound up inbetweening or as a second assistant or something on a single sequence working on one set of characters for four years, which was apparently the way they worked. Whereas at Warner Brothers we spent eight weeks animating a Daffy-Bugs picture, then we’d go to a Tweety-Sylvester picture. It’s also looser animation and there weren’t the demands of perfection that Disney had. It was slapstick: Get it done and have fun doing it, and we had a lot of fun making those films because the characters were fun. You got a kick out of drawing our guys—Daffy, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, all just wonderful characters. Today the films still hold up. I look back now and I didn’t realize the great gift I had been given.

Province: The process of becoming a full animator can take years, yet you were nearly there in a comparatively short period of time. Was it an easy apprenticeship for you?

Holley: I had a lot of help. The animators were always around, and I was just young enough to where I was like their kid brother. Here I am working for Friz Freleng, the funniest guy you would ever want to know, and he took the time to help me, to stand and look right over my shoulder and help me become an animator. I treasure the memory of it now. I was so into cartooning they had to throw me out of the place at night. I just loved the ambiance and being in the environment. Years later I ended up doing the Bugs Bunny comic strip.

Province: I had no idea. How did that happen?

Holley: NEA was looking for someone to take over the Bugs Bunny comic strip. Frank Hill, who had been an assistant on Short Ribs, wanted the feature. He was a great gag writer, but he didn’t know how to draw the Warner Bros. characters. We were neighbors, and he called me and asked if I’d be interested in drawing it, and I said OK. He wrote it and I drew it for roughly five years, from the late ’70s to the mid–’80s. I also did some of the Looney Tunes Warner Bros. comic books for Dell back in the early ’70s. I had a good association with them, and for a while I was doing the Ponytail Sunday and daily, the Bugs Bunny Sunday and daily, as well as the comic books for Dell. I was really into it. I had a studio that was going full-bore. I just really loved it.

Province: How did you become Hank Ketcham’s assistant on Dennis the Menace?

Holley: I still had the idea of a comic strip about a guy and his girlfriend, and I would work on it after hours. Hawley Pratt, a very funny man, an extremely talented guy and Friz’s right-hand man, looked at my drawings and said, “If you’re really interested in comic-strip work, I have a friend, Hank Ketcham. We used to work together at Disney. You should write to him; your style is reminiscent of his.” I should say at this point I avidly followed Hank’s work as a kid when he was a magazine cartoonist. I wrote to Hank and didn’t think much of it. Back came a note saying he would like to meet with me while I was on vacation in August. His studio and home were in Carmel Valley. I was met by Fred Toole who wrote the comic books and handled fan mail. We drove up to a beautiful home. The studio was in a cabana beside a very large pool. That’s where I first met Hank.

Province: Did you meet with him thinking in terms of a job?

Holley: I had my portfolio with me, but all I was thinking about was getting some advice. Hank looked at my stuff and asked how I liked working in animation. He said, “I started in animation and I think that’s great training. You learn how to create characters and work with model sheets,” and we were just chatting away when he said, “I think you have a nice idea here, but you need a little development. What would you think about coming to work as my assistant?” I said, “What?!” and just stood there dumbfounded. Hank said, “I can’t guarantee anything more than a six-week tryout period, and I have several people I’m trying out for the job as my assistant doing the Dennis Sunday page.” Hank was very up-front about the fact that he’d only drawn the Sunday page for the first couple of years and used a team of writers. He felt the daily was the heart of the matter. He said, “The Sunday, I want someone else to do. You’re a young guy, and with your background I think I could train you.” I went back to Warner Bros. and resigned and never gave it a second thought.

Province: You showed Hank your portfolio with your Navy cartoons, and several years later he came out with a sailor strip named Half-Hitch. Have you ever thought your character might have inspired that?

Holley: He used to talk to me about that idea and said he’d had it ever since he was in the Navy. He had used a little sailor when he was in the special artists’ unit during World War II in some of his work. It was still there years later, and I remember seeing Hank Ketcham’s posters in the mess hall in boot camp. It was a cute little character. He didn’t have a name, but it was widely used for posters and things throughout the fleet. He told me during our first meeting that he hoped this would become a strip one day.

Province: Hank has a reputation as a stern taskmaster, but he also has the great successes to validate it. How much control did you have over your work on Dennis? Was everything subject to his approval?

Holley: Initially he was right over my shoulder. It was a difficult school, but I was such an eager student that I didn’t even think of it in those terms. After six weeks, he decided I was the guy he wanted as his assistant. Hank was very tough, but he was fair and saw that I gave it everything I had. I think my studio training in keeping my Bugs Bunny looking like everybody else’s helped me develop that ability. Hank leaned on me a lot, probably more than I was qualified for, but I appreciated the opportunity then, and even more now. I would like to make a note of the fact that Hank Ketcham was a big boost in my professional career.

Province: This would have been what time frame?

Holley: It was three years. I started on Dennis in 1958 and sold Ponytail in 1960. I continued doing the Dennis Sunday for another two years after that, until I got my own Sunday page. Then, Hank said he thought I would be too loaded down and he should start looking for someone else. Province: Were you working on Dennis when the TV show with Jay North made its debut?

Holley: The first day I met Hank, he asked me to come up to the house and introduced me to the producer. He said, “We’re working on a live-action Dennis TV show, and I think it’s going to happen.” He showed me a clip from the pilot with Jay North and said, “Yeah, I think this thing is going to go, so if you come on board with me there will be lots of spinoff work for you.”

Province: Unbelievable luck.

Holley: The timing couldn’t have been better, but I also believe that you make your own luck. If I hadn’t had an accumulation of years of drawing, even as young as I was, with my portfolio and background, it would have been, “Nice meeting you,” and that would have been it. After only four or five months, Hank moved to Europe and said, “I’m leaving my Sunday page in your capable hands, and I know you’ll do a great job.” By this time, the TV show needed promo work, and so did the Kellogg cereal advertisements and the artwork for the grocery story displays; he wanted me to do all that work for him. So now I’m dealing with the Madison Avenue types at Kellogg, and at the same time the Little Golden Books contacted him and wanted to do a few of those. It seemed like the first year or two there was always something going on that needed a drawing of Dennis for something or other. There were a lot of things turned over to me that were requests from local groups, such as the Navy Wives and the Bing Crosby Golf Tournament, that wanted a little drawing of Dennis for a program or something. In fact, Ponytail was in some of those as well. I remember the Monterey Language School asked Hank to come in and give a talk and do some drawings, and he just sent me instead [laughter]. I also did several of the covers of the hardback Dennis the Menace cartoon collections that had the cardboard covers. He was continually feeding me stuff, because he was just overwhelmed. His mind was always working and trying to come up with new things. He had me do some animation of Dennis, a little black- and-white 8mm loop that I worked on at home. He was a very difficult character to animate because he has short little arms and legs, but I was always being given things like that to do. He was always thinking and willing to try anything—really, a very bright guy.

Province: Did you handle any of the art work on the Dennis comic books?

Holley: There was a period where I had to jump in and do some of the comic-book pages as well. The artist who usually did those was just a little off-center, and Hank couldn’t stand having him around. He’d call at 2 a.m. complaining that he couldn’t figure out how a layout should go or something, and Hank just refused to have him on the premises. At one point, Hank and I were both working on the comic books against deadlines, trying to crank out this stuff the guy had penciled; he was a real perfectionist. Hank got a call one day from him and he said, “Look, I don’t want this guy Lee Holley screwing up my work any more and I don’t like his inking!” Hank asked him what pages he was talking about and he went into great detail about what was wrong with them. When he was finished, Hank said, “Those are the pages I inked!” [laughter].

Province: Nothing like getting in tight with the boss! The early ’60s was the height of Dennis’ popularity. Was it a very solid schedule for you in those days?

Holley: It was. Hank told me he’d had a guy working for him once that took it as a 9-to-5 job, and [said] that we don’t work that way. If we met our deadlines by 3 o’clock on Wednesday, that was great, but if not, we could be there working at midnight on Saturday. I loved it and it was fine with me, but that’s the way it worked the whole time I was there. Whatever came down the pike, we worked on it until it was done.

Province: You produced some wonderful drawings for the Dennis Little Golden Books and a series of Dennis storybooks. Hawley Pratt worked on them as well.

Holley: I needed some help; I couldn’t do it all by myself. It was just too much. I called him at Warner Bros. because I really admired his talent, and I asked if he wanted to do the layouts.

Province: The ghosts on Dennis have always been somewhat anonymous, but you received credit on some of the promotional work you did, such as the Golden Books, the Dennis Storybooks and other material. How did you manage that?

Holley: Hank was generous enough to say that this was the guy who did the work, and he should have his name on it; that’s the only way it could have gotten on there.

Province: The Ketcham style that you ghosted so well is deceptively complicated. It looks like just a few lines haphazardly dashed off, but it’s actually very complex.

Holley: That part of Dennis is what I took away with me, and trying to duplicate that style was really most beneficial. The stuff is so well laid out. He can say more with less lines than anyone I know, as well as his use of blacks. You have to see Hank in action to really appreciate it. I never thought I really got the character down well at all, but I came close enough to satisfy him.

Province: Marcus Hamilton, who draws the daily Dennis panel since Hank’s retirement, asked me to pass on how very much he admires your work.

Holley: Well, tell him that I admire what he’s doing, because until you told me that just now, I had no idea Hank was no longer drawing the panel. It really fooled me. Any of the other stuff I can tell, but he is very good; he must be or Hank wouldn’t let him sign his name to it. Tell him I said that, will you?

Province: What was the operation like with Hank in Europe and his staff in California?

Holley: After selling his home, Hank rented a very nice studio in Carmel Valley Village for myself, Fred Toole and Arch Garner, who designed the Dennis toys and dolls. The comic strip Hank said he would help me develop was set aside when his life changed. So I just kept cranking away at it.

Province: There were no fax machines, e-mail or FedEx in 1960. How did he review your work after he left the country? Did you have to stay months ahead?

Holley: I mailed my Sunday pages to New York from Carmel, and Hank mailed his panels from Switzerland. Occasionally I’d receive a tissue overlay where he would make suggestions about a page he had seen, but he didn’t see every page I drew. He was very casual about it in those days, and he really let me go, probably a lot more than he should have. But there was a lot going on in his life at the time. I worked hard and did the very best I could for him, because I knew what a great opportunity this was, and besides, it was just a neat thing to be doing. I was in the heart of producing one of the most popular comic strips in the world.

Province: What were your usual production methods? Like all veteran animators, did you make use of the lightboard?

Holley: Not the swivel top, but a real thick heavy-duty job with a frosted pane of glass with two fluorescent tubes. That was a direct throwback to the animation industry: doing the rough then inking it over. I always used a #2 Windsor-Newton brush, but Hank used a pen, and learning to use a pen was the hardest thing for me. The daily panel and the Sunday page would be laid out with lines for the dialogue. The layouts were all mine. I would do all the pencil work and letter in the speech balloons and then put the two-ply Strathmore over it and trace it. Then we would take it to a photostat place and have it copied, then color it. I did all the coloring for the Sunday page. Hank insisted I use Doc Martin dyes, but they were so deep I had to water them down quite a bit.

Province: At what point did you decide to start concentrating on developing your own strip?

Holley: I just always had this bug about doing my own strip, and wanted to try it. Hank had put a lot of responsibility on me, and I came very close to being completely carried away with working for him. But eventually I wrote him about it and said I still wanted to try doing my own strip. Hank agreed, but I don’t think he liked the idea. He said he was only sorry he hadn’t put me under contract, which was very flattering, but I had to take it with a grain of salt. I was still young enough to want to try this and I had to know. By this time I’d changed the character to a teenage girl. I had done some magazine cartoons for Teen magazine about a character with a ponytail. I didn’t have a name for her, so I just called her “Ponytail” because that’s what a lot of girls were wearing then. They wanted me to draw a regular feature. Bob Barnes saw what I had done and said they were too good for just a magazine and that I should try a syndicate. I sent them off to King Features and received a telegram asking me to call Sylvan Byck, their comics editor, collect so that they could get me under contract.

Province: What was Hank’s reaction when Ponytail was sold?

Holley: He had come back from Europe. We met at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for a drink when I told him about it. He was very pleased for me, very generous and kind and told me I was with a great outfit. He wished me a lot of luck and said I was going to make a million dollars. He said I could even go on doing the Sunday page, and if I could maintain the quality, the job was still mine, so I continued doing the Dennis Sunday page until 1962.

Province: So you were producing the Dennis Sunday page as well as your own daily Ponytail panels. How did your association with Hank Ketcham finally end?

Holley: After about a year, on my own initiative I sent King Features three Ponytail Sunday pages. They liked the idea and said they would launch a color Sunday page in three months. I let Hank, who was in Europe, know right away. He got back to me and he very nicely said he thought I may have more than I can handle, and he may after a while want to look around for someone else. For a while I was doing the Ponytail daily and Sunday as well as the Dennis Sunday, but he eventually decided he needed someone who could give it his full-time devotion. It was a very nice association, and one I enjoyed very much and wish could have continued longer than it did, but I was on my way. It was sort of like leaving the womb.

Province: It’s interesting that you had the original concept all along. In some circles, Ponytail is considered a Dennis spinoff. I’ve even heard her referred to as “Dennis’ baby sitter.”

Holley: She was in the sample strips I originally showed Hank, but the main character was a guy. My thinking changed as Teen magazine put the emphasis on the girl. The original syndicate promo work for Ponytail emphasized that teenage girls buy things, and this was a hot market. I started off with a client list of 15 papers and was a little alarmed that that’s all there was. The syndicate said not to worry because it was going to be a very successful strip. Then they started to move it.

Province: When Ponytail made its debut, you opted for the single panel rather than the strip, the same as the daily Dennis.

Holley: I listened to Hank, who said—not necessarily to school me—why draw four or five panels when you can say it all in one? I didn’t know that after a while a strip gets anchored to a certain spot on a page while panels are placed all over the map. A strip is always on the comics page. Panels are also initially easier to place, but easier to drop as well.

Province: As well as the panel format, Ponytail was drawn in the Ketcham style. Was this something you did consciously or did you fall victim to the old assistant’s disease?

Holley: Probably. You learn to draw a certain way and you can digress to a degree, but sure—I was right there working for Hank when Ponytail was sold. I should mention another cartoonist who influenced me growing up: Henry Syverson. I loved his loose style.

Province: Did you write your own material for Ponytail?

Holley: Initially, I bought gags, because I knew a little bit about how the gag market worked. I had met Bob Harman, who was a ghost writer for Hank, and he put me in contact with a few writers, who then began to call me. The word gets around as well, and you start getting unsolicited gags. Gradually I became a little more confident and began putting my own stuff in, supplementing and combining my material with bought material.

Province: During one of our earlier chats, you mentioned another opportunity that arose around the same time Ponytail sold.

Holley: I sent eight colored cartoon roughs off to Playboy based on my fine-art background in illustrating the human figure and life-drawing classes. I thought Playboy was a good market, the graphics were great, so why not try for the top? I didn’t think anyone would be satisfied, especially since a couple of them were quite primitive. Back came a handwritten letter from Hugh Hefner, saying he’d like me to work for Playboy. In those days, he was on top of everything, almost to the point of sharpening the pencils. He said he liked my style and thought it reminiscent of Jack Cole, which was quite a nice compliment. I think he felt that in time I could evolve into something similar to Cole. He’d penciled a little “H” in the corner of three of the drawings and asked me to do some finishes. Eldon Dedini was a big help to me. I called him up and told him about the opportunity, and he was very generous with his time in looking at my work. They published one—a full-color cartoon—and I decided not to do any more. It was a tough decision. It was coincidental that at the same time King Features had put me under contract, and I didn’t want to rock the boat. I’d been given an opportunity to do what I’ve always dreamed of—a syndicated comic strip—with an outfit I came to realize was the place to be. I didn’t want to jeopardize this wholesome teenage thing by doing something that was perceived back then as pretty raunchy.

Province: What was your fan mail like during Ponytail’s run?

Holley: I got a lot of it, especially in the beginning. Very nice and most of it from teens and parents. I still have a big stack I’ve kept.

Province: What kind of relationship did you have with your syndicate?

Holley: King Features was a great outfit to work for, and the only requirement was to make the deadlines. I got a letter from Sylvan Byck once, and he wrote me that, when I had a scene with the girls on the beach, I’d drawn them with belly buttons. He said they had to white those out. He asked if I minded. I didn’t care, but that was the mentality.

Province: Mort Walker went through the same thing with Beetle Bailey. An editor supposedly kept the cut-out belly buttons in a jar on his desk.

Holley: Mort had fun with it. Another time Sylvan Byck wrote me a letter about a strip I’d done showing a kid wearing a German cross. I did a lot of surfing gags during the heyday of the Beach Boys, and I was living in California. Lots of kids were wearing Maltese Crosses around their necks. Sylvan Byck had probably lost family in the Holocaust. He wrote me this was a symbol of a very tragic era and so on. I’d never related it to the Nazis, and though he didn’t imply that I had, he let me know it was taboo. I felt very bad about that one. It made me appreciate the impact you could make even with a comic strip.

Province: Teenage fads develop and vanish so quickly. Did you work at keeping Ponytail current?

Holley: I made a concerted effort to keep the panel contemporary. I subscribed to Teen Beat and Seventeen. I was still young enough to go to the high school where I’d grown up, and they would let me come into the classes. If you remember, I used the name “Watson Hill High.” I attended Watsonville High in Watsonville, California, and used their letterman’s sweater with the block “W” and everything. Since the idea of doing a comic strip had come to me in high school, when it eventually happened I used my old alma mater set in a small town near the Monterey area where I grew up. My daughter’s teenage years were a big help, but gradually if you follow teenagers and their fads, you’ll notice the redundancy. It becomes ridiculous as years go by. As for me doing a teenage strip, I was getting well past it and began putting more emphasis on the father and how he related to his daughter and her boyfriend. That’s how the strip changed.

Province: You always worked in very highly competitive artistic fields, yet you were continually moving and changing direction when most artists would have considered themselves lucky to have steady work and be paying the bills.

Holley: That’s the way my life has been. There is always something around the corner. My feeling is that if I don’t try it, I’ll never know and I’ll always wonder. I’d rather try it, and hopefully not fail, but at least I’ll know that I did it, whether it’s learning how to fly my own plane or running a marathon. I’ve run in more than 50 of them; 10 were Boston Marathons, not to mention 50- and 100-mile runs. It’s the challenge. They take you to a place physically and mentally not many people go. I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t know whether it’s good or bad, but that’s how I have always approached things. I guess I was so young I thought I could do anything.

Province: There was a series of Ponytail comic books from Dell in the mid-’60s. Was any of this your work?

Holley: I did some of the art and most of the covers, but I had a friend named Frank Hill who later did a strip called Short Ribs who drew most of it. I thought he was very talented and a very funny writer. It was moderately successful and went on for five or six years. Nothing really grand came out of it, not like Archie or anything. It was fun thing to do, and back in those days I was still thinking in terms of maximizing the feature to get the most money out of it.

Province: At its peak in the mid-’60s, what was Ponytail’s circulation?

Holley: We were in about 300 papers, and it was a very generous income for those days. To give you an example, a top animator at Warner Bros. at that time was making about $200 a week. As an assistant animator I was making $75. The directors like Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones were making around $25,000 a year. The president, Eddie Selzer, who was Jack Warner’s brother-in-law, was reportedly making $50,000 a year, which just boggled my mind. I left to go to work for Hank in ’58 and was there three years making as much as a top animator. After I sold Ponytail, I thought I’d go back to Warner Bros. and say hello to the guys. Hawley Pratt, Gerry Chiniquy and Friz took me out to lunch. We’re sitting there and it dawns on me that I’m making almost twice as much as Eddie Selzer and driving a brand-new Porsche. This is what the comic-strip business was in 1962 if you could come up with something that moved! If it really caught on, then forget it—the sky was the limit. It wasn’t just the money, though that is important; what really impressed me is it happened in such a relatively short period of time. People tell me I’m lucky, and I guess I have to agree with them. But I always remember those long years when I kept plugging away. I was never the most talented guy in the class. I was just the one who worked the hardest.

Province: Of your work in animation, Dennis and Ponytail, what has brought you the most satisfaction?

Holley: Doing what I loved to do. Even more than that was the freedom and independence that doing a comic strip can bring. There was no one telling me what to do. I had deadlines, but other than that I was on my own. It really wasn’t work to me. I worked out of my home and it brought rewards so that my wife and I could do things at a young age that people usually wait until they’re in their 60s to do. We traveled in Europe. We bought a new E-type Jaguar and picked it up in London and drove it throughout the British Isles and on the continent. Here I was, 30 years old and traveling all around Europe, down to the south of France, the Riviera, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, being free as a bird and having the money to enjoy it. I had a drawing board with a glass in the middle of it so I could do my daily panel while we were away. Wherever we happened to be, I could take a lamp and set it up under the board and turn out my daily panel. It wasn’t that difficult, really, and I got to where I could set something up wherever we happened to be. I can remember setting up on the balcony of a hotel overlooking Acapulco and doing the panel while enjoying a view of the bay. My wife and I would take off for Hawaii or somewhere, just the two of us.

Province: In the 1960s there was a small but impressive cartoonist community in the Carmel-Monterey area. Were you ever a part of that?

Holley: Eldon Dedini was up there, Virgil Partch, Jimmy Hatlo, Gus Arriola, Bob Barnes. A very interesting group. They were certainly nice people, but a bit older.

Province: Did you ever suffer any career setbacks or disappointment during your years in the business?

Holley: I never did. There’s not one I can think of. It was all such a kick. That’s the only word I can use to describe it. As a cartoonist you couldn’t do any better than getting into animation at Warner Bros. and drawing all those great characters, and not realizing until later just what a great experience it was. There was only a small window of time where the really great stuff was done, and to have had the opportunity to be part of it and to work for Friz Freleng, Virgil Ross, Hawley Pratt, Gerry Chiniquy . . . I look back and am so grateful.

Province: Do you follow the daily comics any more? Do you have any current favorites?

Holley: I miss Calvin and Hobbes. I still admire Hank’s work because he is simply a fine draftsman. I probably think of these things in terms of the graphics rather than the humor. To be honest, as my life changed and went in other directions, I haven’t given a whole lot of thought to them. Probably I should, but I’m involved in other things. I get invited to a lot of schools. When the word gets out that you can draw the Warner Bros. characters, kids just love them. If a school asks me, I’ll go and do some drawings or a benefit for something and give them to the kids. I do a little painting. As you can see, we are doing some remodeling here, but I want to turn this back room into a studio so I can keep on painting as a hobby.

Province: Based on your career experiences, would you advise someone working in comics today to be continually prepared to leave the field?

Holley: Unfortunately, yes. If you want to be a cartoonist, it’s a wonderful profession and can be very rewarding. There’s a whole new world of communication and entertainment, and it’s rapidly changing. I would not want to be out there now looking to a future in comics unless my name was Mort Walker or Charles Schulz. You are dependent on this thing for your livelihood, and I would keep my day job. I picked up on that about 10 years into my syndication. I was still a young guy, and my daughter was born, and it changed my thinking to begin looking ahead. I want my daughter to enjoy this kind of life as well. I would say to a young person, though, that you don’t want to spend your life wondering. Go for it! What do you have to lose? At least you’ll know you tried, and if you succeed you’ll have done it for a while. That means a lot, especially when you’re older.