BOOK REVIEW! PONYTAIL by Lee Holley (Dell, 1963)

Well, it ain't like they're gonna be reprinting these 'uns like they are ARCHIE and DICK TRACY, and in some small way I'm kinda glad because it makes PONYTAIL all the more mine. One of the comics I've read or have been read to since my earliest days of recollection, PONYTAIL remains a fave not only for the nice gag humor but for the loose, DENNIS THE MENACE-styled art that still calls out 1963 to me as much as the last season of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, THE RIFLEMAN and the earliest days of "Make Mine Marvel" combined! In fact as far back as my little mind will take me both PONYTAIL as well as ARCHIE were what gave me the idea of what teenage life was going to be like once I finally made it into the double-digits...y'know, with hot dog roasts and soda shops and all that, and when I was a mere six those years did seem like the most exciting thing for any suburban slob kid to look forward to! Too bad that when I did hit them years all I found out was that teendom was only youth with the homework, drudgery, insecurities and humiliation magnified about ten times...I guess the real purpose of these comics was to give kids like myself something good to look forward to just so's we didn't try to off ourselves before we hit the age of thirteen!

All kidding aside (after all, if you can't laugh at childhood suicides what can you laugh at?), PONYTAIL was a boffo comic panel (and full-sized Sunday strip) that really reflected a certain period in time when being teenage was supposed to have been some really big to-do. (Witness my sister's response at looking at the cover of this book and going "awwwww" as if she were remembering a friendly neighborhood dog of her own childhood or perhaps a favorite doll she still has stashed somewhere.) Gags ain't as out-there as they were during the classic years of DENNIS, but they're still ranch house attuned enough to make you wanna long for your own pimplefarm days when all you had to look forward to after a hard day at school was that art book with alla them statues you got outta the library and maybe some hand lotion, ifyaknowaddamean...

Nice, breezy encapsulation of those early-sixties days all your "enlightened" friends loathe and they'll surely hate this because well...there aren't any black people or gays or social issues to be found anywhere unless you're looking for a reference to Prez Kennedy's call for a more fit populace (I guess the later strips did deal with "relevant" social messages but how serious could they get being espoused by a teenage girl and her boyfriend wearing their early-sixties clothing not forgetting Donald's Frankie Avalon haircut?) so therefore they must be banished! To where I do not know but considering how I'm sure most people remember PONYTAIL about as much as they do Francis Gary Powers the social planners did a pretty good job of it, dontcha think?

And by the way, if you do think that artist Lee Holley's style comes a bit too close to Hank Ketchum for comfort it should be known that Holley did work as Ketchum's assistant in the fifties, even ghosting the Sunday DENNIS page before creating and selling PONYTAIL to King Features in 1960. So if you wonder why the gal looks like Dennis grown up with a sex change now you know.