''Priscilla's Pop'' was an American

gag-a-day A gag-a-day comic strip is the style of writing comic cartoons such that every installment of a strip delivers a complete joke or some other kind of artistic statement. It is opposed to story or continuity strips, which rely on the development of ...

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

drawn by Al Vermeer. Syndicated by the

Newspaper Enterprise Association The Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) is an editorial column and comic strip newspaper syndication service based in the United States and established in 1902. The oldest syndicate still in operation, the NEA was originally a secondary news ...

, it ran from July 7, 1946, until September 11, 1983. Vermeer drew the strip from July 7, 1946, to July 17, 1976; Edmund R. "Ed" Sullivan picked up the strip after Vermeer's retirement.

Characters and themes

The strip featured Priscilla Nutchell, a young girl who was obsessed with the idea of owning a horse, and her parents Hazel and Waldo Nutchell. Other characters in the strip were her older brother Carlyle, her two young friends Hollyhock and Stuart, and her dog Oliver. Comics historian

Don Markstein Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge) is an online encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation, initiated February 13, 2001. Donald D. Markstein, the sole writer and editor of Toonop ...

described the situation: :The young school-age daughter was, of course, Priscilla. She was, in every possible way, a perfectly normal kid, outrageous only to the extent that most people that age are outrageous. It was only Waldo who got exasperated trying to deal with her. The cast was rounded out by Priscilla's friend, Hollyhock (who liked to read and consequently had a lot of general knowledge swimming around in her head), and Hollyhock's nemesis, Stuart (who doubted most of the factoids Hollyhock expressed).Toonopedia: ''Priscilla's Pop''
/ref> A constant theme of the strip was Waldo's lunch, which consisted of eating mashed potato sandwiches to save money until the mortgage was paid. Another theme was Priscilla's yearning for her very own horse. Sometime before the strip ended, money was found in the family budget to buy a horse. Waldo, however, was still eating mashed potato sandwiches.

References

External links

American comic strips Gag-a-day comics Comics characters introduced in 1946 1946 comics debuts 1983 comics endings {{comic-strip-stub