Paper Doll Month, Day 17: Then I saw her face, now Irma believer

"Irma's Fashions" from My Friend Irma #35 (Marvel/Atlas, September 1953), pencils and inks by Dan DeCarlo
My Friend Irma was a popular radio, movie, TV (and, yes, comic book) series focusing on the antics of smart girl Jane and her best friend and roommate, the silly-headed Irma (like Gracie Allen, though, Irma was always full of some sort of universal sense).



Mostly forgotten today, My Friend Irma is perhaps best remembered as the movie that introduced the duo of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to a worldwide audience:



...and while Irma's comic book was at Marvel, Dean and Jerry's was over at DC, on what I like to call Earth-28, the world they shared with the adventures of Bob Hope. Therefore, we can deduce that the My Friend Irma movie took place on the same world that hosted the Superman/Spider-Man crossovers or the X-Men and the Teen Titans team-up...Crossover-Earth, the only Earth that lies directly between the DC and Marvel multiverses. Until Grant Morrison blew it up. BOOM!

So, now you know how My Friend Irma died...in a cataclysmic crossover comic book event.

Separated at Birth: Everyone knows it's Dobie

L: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis #3 (Sepember-October 1960), art by Bob Oksner
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)

L: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis #6 (March-April 1961), art by Bob Oksner
R: Windy and Willy #3 (September-October 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to toddler-size)

L: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis #12 (March-April 1962), art by Bob Oksner
R: Windy and Willy #1 (May-June 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to Taurus-the-Bull-size)

L: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis #19 (May-June 1963), art by Bob Oksner
R: Windy and Willy #4 (November-December 1969), art by Bob Oksner
(Click picture to tossing-the-bull-size)

L: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis #20 (July-August 1963), art by Bob Oksner
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.

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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!