Last Monday morning, a single-engine Mooney M20E airplane crashed and burned at the airfield in Marina, California. The pilot, who was reportedly killed upon impact, was the very fine cartoonist, Lee Holley.
Lee was born April 20, 1932 in Phoenix. He got his first cartooning job at age 15 and by the time he was 21, he was doing animation and layout work for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio. In 1957, he began assisting Hank Ketcham on Dennis the Menace, drawing the Sunday page, a few of the comic books and much of the merchandise art. That went on until 1960 when Lee sold his own syndicated strip, Ponytail, which he did until 1988. Between 1980 and 1988, Lee and his friend and frequent collaborator Frank Hill also produced the syndicated Bugs Bunny newspaper strip.
Lee was no stranger to Bugs, having worked on his cartoons at the Warner Brothers studio. But he also drew Bugs in comic books for Western Publishing's Gold Key line and that made me very happy because I was writing a lot of them. He drew most of the new stories of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tweety & Sylvester that ran in the early issues of the revived Looney Tunes comic that Western launched in 1975 and did occasional stories for the Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig comics. (Online sources say he also drew The Jetsons for Gold Key but I don't think that's true.)
The editors at Western loved the way Lee drew teenage girls so much that they asked me to create an Archie-like teen comic for him to draw. The result was Tom, Dick and Harriet (not my title) which had three tryout issues but never graduated to a regular series. I wrote the first two and Lee did a terrific job on his end. We were both sorry there weren't more. Other comic books Lee drew would include the Ponytail comics published by Dell and later Charlton.
Though we corresponded a bit, I only spoke to Lee in person once — at a San Diego Comic Con in the seventies. He was a very nice man who obviously loved his profession…and why wouldn't he when he was so good at it?
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