R: Windy and Willy #2 (July-August 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(And see also at the bottom of this post, Swing with Scooter #36)
(Click picture to muscle-beach-size)
R: Windy and Willy #3 (September-October 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to toddler-size)
R: Windy and Willy #1 (May-June 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to Taurus-the-Bull-size)
R: Windy and Willy #4 (November-December 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to tossing-the-bull-size)
R: Showcase #81 (March 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to Denny-Terriosize)
No, folks, you're not seein' double (five times!) DC's 1969 comic book series The Way-Out World of Windy and Willy (four issues plus a debut in Showcase) was inspired by DC's own '60-'64 series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis...inspired by, in this case, meaning very nearly the same comic book! Each of the Windy stories was a reprint of a Dobie story, relettered and retouched to reflect the changed character names and designs, with newly drawn covers using the same old jokes as five issues of Dobie by the original artist, Bob Oksner! So, which DC-Earth do you think Dobie lived on...and did Willy live on its version of Earth-2? Now that there's only fifty-two earths, are they both stuck on Earth-28, the home in the multiverse of Alan Ladd, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Pat Boone, Bob Hope, and Puffy AmiYumi? And if so, when will they cross over with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman?
Call me, Didio. I've got the whole 12-part megaseries worked out in my head already.
EDIT!: Hold the phone, Separatists! We've got ourselves a triplet!:
Swing with Scooter #36 (October-November 1972), art by Stan Goldberg and Henry Scarpelli
Brought to my attention by "Dauntless" Dr. K of Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular, here's a third version of the beach gag shown above on Dobie #3 and Windy #2. The evidence mounts for an analysis of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development to be applied to the pre-Crisis Earth-28: in a world where three pairs of teenagers make the same jokes in the period of twelve years, surely there's some giant hand at the beginning of time spinning events into some sort of multiple-earth beach-gag tapesty!
Or, maybe, like everybody imitating the Fonz or Austin Powers, it's just an old joke used one time too many. Only Rip Hunter, Time Master could tell us for sure!
Thanks, Dr. K!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQenrY-T9_-EUVG2XBTW-ZiSnvw_V3JFU-8tiFlhrdgKCUBaE56ekbiILucymY9gA-xa4zdGy_z1Njojw78Z-YnlUiN4PIRRurK7GzqoEg3B-PmXl2RJaS1ZaVKVCEHP-m-WVr2xjqailLu1jlzylysiBGc3sVXLXNMFDzAURyrHhKBfcqyO4/s1600/button-libertybellmarch.jpg" "It's...")
4 comments:
That is an incredible bit of research. So wasn't Dobbie Gills a TV show? Did DC lose the rights to the name and likeness but keep the rights to the art?
I can see why they did it, how could they have known that 50 years later advanced computer technology and sharp-eyed stuffed bulls would expose them!
I can't take any of the credit for discovering it, KK--in fact it's a pretty well-known and -documented fact in comics history. I remember reading about it some time ago in Scott Shaw!'s Oddball Comics column, and the books are listed as redone Dobies in the Grand Comicbook Database. I don't think anyone had put together the five pairs of covers side-by-side before on the internet, though.
'pretty well known' must have a different meaning than the one I'm used to... Cause I never heard of either book before.
So go ahead and take the credit.
Yes, THE MANY LIVES OF DOBIE GILLIS was a television show.
It also inspired Scooby-Doo.
https://www.metv.com/stories/the-characters-of-scooby-doo-were-based-on-the-many-loves-of-dobie-gillis
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