The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis debuted on CBS on September 29, 1959. Based on a popular book by Max Shulman, which had already been made into a movie, this new situation comedy starred Dwayne Hickman as Dobie and Bob Denver as his beatnik pal, Maynard G. Krebs. The series lasted four seasons and its name was quietly changed to just Dobie Gillis for a while, then it was Max Shulman's Dobie Gillis and I think it went back to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis at some point. This is not something that I — or as far as I can tell, anyone — noticed at the time.
I remember liking it a lot back then and thinking it was very smart and very "hip" comedy. Then again, I was seven in 1959 and maybe not the best judge of what was smart or hip. I knew it was smarter and hipper than most other situation comedies back then but that wasn't hard to be. In later years, I remember liking the reruns but thinking they maybe weren't quite as wonderful as I recalled.
I also remember buying the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis comic book which DC launched not all that long after the show debuted. The first one hit the stands on 3/8/60 and it ran for 26 issues, actually lasting almost a year longer than the show did. Sales (obviously) declined when CBS took the program off. While it lasted, the comic did a pretty good job of replicating the show, I thought. There's a bit of a mystery though as to who did this very good job. There were credits only on the last few issues.
Bob Oksner was the main artist and he was ideally suited for the book as he was good at drawing likenesses of real people and real (italics for emphasis) good at drawing pretty ladies. In fact, Oksner was one of those artists — and he was not the only one of these — who didn't get much recognition for much of his career because he didn't spend most of it drawing super-heroes. About when he retired, which was in the mid-eighties, fans and students of comic art finally began to say, "Hey, this guy was terrific." I guess it takes time for some of them to notice a good artist and Oksner had only been drawing comic books and comic strips since 1940.
But he got a fair amount of help on those 26 issues of Dobie. Mike Roy did some of the penciling work here and there and Mort Drucker seems to have pitched in now and then. (Drucker also drew unrelated gag pages that ran in some issues.) Sam Burlockoff did some of the inking and there may have been a few other helpers. Oksner appears to have acted as a kind of Art Director for the book, occasionally retouching the work of others.
Who wrote the comic is more elusive. The last two or three issues were written by Arnold Drake but only the last two or three. Various names have been tossed about as to who wrote the rest and certainly a number of them were unofficially written by Oksner. Why he did this "unofficially" is an interesting story.
The editor of the comic up until #24 "officially" wrote some of them but it's been said — by Oksner and others — that this editor would coerce someone else into writing scripts for him for little or no money, then he would pocket the entire writer's fee himself. His modus operandi, as reported by others, was to tell someone like Bob, "I advanced some money to a writer who was in dire need of money and then he never handed in a script. The company may take legal action against him unless someone can write a script I can pass off as his and I don't have the time."
You might think a person would have to be pretty gullible to fall for this but back then, there were editors who extorted kickbacks from freelancers — "If you want work from me, you have to slip me some bucks." Some freelancers — and remember, these are mostly guys who grew up in The Great Depression — accepted this as a necessity in order to get steady work. This particular editor allegedly did this too, and Oksner admitted he sometimes paid kickbacks or wrote scripts without pay. He wrote some issues of Dobie Gillis though, try as he might, he couldn't identify which issues.
Some have guessed Cal Howard might have written at least a couple. Howard wrote a lot of DC's funnier comics including The Adventures of Bob Hope for the same editor around the same time but there's no evidence he wrote Dobie Gillis. In 2002, Oksner was an honored guest at Comic-Con and I got to interview this very nice, talented man who, alas, didn't recall much about back when he worked in this comic. When I asked him if Howard wrote any issues of Dobie Gillis, Bob replied, "Probably but I don't remember if he did." So make of that what you will. All I can say for sure is that I thought some of the scripts were pretty good.
Someone at DC in 1969 must have thought so too because that's when they brought it back — but not as Dobie Gillis. As I've written before here, I thought DC management from about '68 to '75 did a lot of things wrong. They did a lot of things right too but those included being too hasty to give up on some of those things they did right. DC then paid nothing to writers and artists when their past work was reprinted…not a cent. Nothing. Bupkis. And they tried a few times to repackage old material as new.
This, I thought, was one of the things they did wrong. They no longer had the license to make Dobie Gillis comics but there was apparently nothing stopping them from reprinting those old issues if they changed the names and faces…and while they were at it, Maynard got an upgrade (?) from beatnik to hippie. Oksner redrew the covers and they looked a little contemporary…but inside the book, someone who was not as skilled as he was retouched the hair styles and clothings and other identifying markings. They relettered some names, too. But here — rather than explain it further, let me just show you what they did…
See what they did there? They didn't change the stories. They didn't change the dialogue except to change Dobie to Willy, Maynard to Windy and other named characters to differently-named characters. Put 'em together and what have you got? Why, The Way-Out World of Windy and Willy. It lasted for one issue of Showcase and four issues of its own book. Nelson Bridwell, who was on staff then, told me it might have been the worst-selling book the company ever published.
And why wouldn't it be? America had changed a lot in those years and in '69, it was way outta step with what teenagers were doing and thinking and how they were talking. This practice of updating old stories and passing them off as contemporary to save money is probably what killed off the love comic genre; that and trying to do stories about dating (and by implication, sex) under the Comics Code.
Reprinting a classic comic intact as a historical piece can be very saleable, especially these days when reprints usually have better paper and reproduction than the original publications. But I can't think of many times that customers bought refried, clumsily-updated old material. Matter of fact, at the moment, I can't think of any…but I'm saying "many" just in case there are one or two.
I have a few more articles coming up here about things I think DC did wrong between 1968 and 1975. They include canceling a lot of very good comics too quickly…but they were sure wise to get rid of this one, a.s.a.p.