The lead the story in the ninth issue, "The Shady Brady," represented one of my favorite kinds of stories — the Evil Twin episode! Rob gets Alan to promise to join them performing at an army hospital that evening, but Alan reneges because he has to go on a sudden business trip. He departs, then suddenly and inexplicably returns to the office ahead of schedule. What no one realizes is that the real Alan left but an Alan Brady impersonator, who'd been lurking around the building, spying and waiting weeks for his chance, walked in and took his place.

The phony Alan is really an aspiring actor named Carl Reinhart (cute touch) whose career has never taken off because everyone tells him he looks so much like that big TV star, Alan Brady. Bitter and angry, he has come to loathe Alan Brady and to believe that the star owes him, so he sets about to assume his identity and loot the Brady bank account. He takes Alan's checkbook, writes a huge check and politely asks Mel to go have it cashed. Mel is puzzled when Alan says "please" and doesn't tell him to shut up, but he complies. It turns out, it will take several hours for the bank to process matters and deliver the cash, so Reinhart has to keep the charade up that long.

When Rob discovers that "Alan" is there, he insists Alan come, as promised, to the army hospital. Mel says he'll bring the cash over when it arrives, so Reinhart goes along to the hospital, where Laura does a dance number, Sally sings a torch song, Rob does a pantomime, and Buddy does a cello solo and tells a joke about a talking parrot. When "Alan Brady" is introduced, the crowd goes crazy and begins chanting for him to do his famous Portuguese Fisherman routine. Reinhart is trapped…but with a little prompting from Rob, he's able to get through it. At the end, people are cheering him and asking for autographs, and patients in the hospital ward are telling the man they think is Alan Brady what it means to them to have him there. Reinhart is moved by this, and begins to think he has misjudged Brady.

In the meantime though, Rob has realized that there's something odd about Alan…his comic delivery was better than usual. When Rob hears that Alan hasn't insulted Mel all day, he realizes it must be an impostor! He confronts "Alan" just as Mel is delivering the cash, and Reinhart grabs the money and takes off. There's a big chase through the hospital and then I'm not sure what happens because there was a contest in this issue of the comic book and some moron cut out a coupon in my copy. It was on the other side of the next-to-last page of the story and though I've been searching for years for a complete copy, I've never seen one. (If anyone has one, please e-mail me. And if you can, scan the page and send me a JPG file of it.) Anyway, on the last page, Reinhart has voluntarily given the money back and confessed, "I'm not Alan Brady…I could never be a great star like Alan Brady." But Rob, Sally and Buddy have an idea and they not only get Alan to not press charges but to hire Reinhart as his stand-in! In the last two panels, Reinhart is doing the job and he tells Mel to shut up. Rob remarks, "Boy, he's really learning how to be Alan Brady."

I'm hesitant to judge this story since I missed a vital piece of it, but I will say that it seems like a good one. The main weakness seems to be that the comic book was still not showing Alan Brady's face, so we don't get to see how much Carl Reinhart looks like him. I, for one, was curious.

The back-up story, "Super-Dentist," focused on Jerry Helper. His son Freddie is ashamed because his father is "only" a dentist and all the kids at school tell him that dentists are bad men who hurt people. To counter this, Rob sits Freddie and Ritchie down and tells them a story he makes up on the spot. It casts Jerry as a great super-hero dentist who flies around and helps people. At the end, a giant, furious King Kong style ape is about to step on New Rochelle and crush it but he doesn't because Super-Dentist flies up and fixes the toothache that has made him go on a rampage. The huge ape becomes docile, New Rochelle is spared and the only problem is that Jerry tells the ape to rinse, and it does and floods Scarsdale. The story causes Ritchie and Freddie to see Jerry in a new light but when Jerry offers to thank Rob by filling a cavity he's had for some time, Rob runs off, crying that dentists hurt people! It's not a bad story but the ending seems a little out of character for Rob.

#9 brought us a story called "Attack of the Green-Eyed Monster" which was, of course, all about jealousy.  Laura volunteers for a Keep New Rochelle Beautiful story and finds herself working many evenings with a local attorney who has also volunteered his time.  It turns out he was Laura's first boy friend back in high school and while Laura insists there's nothing between them, Rob starts suspecting otherwise.  The lawyer, Ken Cosgrove, is handsome and charming and very successful and divorced and much admired by Laura.  Cosgrove often volunteers his time to help out with social causes and he has a long list of achievements in this area, whereas Rob just writes jokes for a living.  Or at least, that's the way Rob sees it.

This was not one of my favorite stories.  I also didn't care much for several episodes they did on the TV show that were about jealousy — Rob resenting Laura's friendship with some attractive man or Laura's insecurity about Rob working late with a glamorous star, etc. I somehow never saw the Rob-Laura marriage as being that fragile…so the comic was covering ground that I felt the TV show had overdone and did, I thought, a much worse job of it.  Rob makes a fool of himself fretting that Laura thinks more highly of Cosgrove than of him, and does a lot of stupid things to try and prove that he's a man of achievement.  And of course at the end, it turns out that Laura never had the slightest interest in Cosgrove, who it turns out is not as noble and selfless as he seemed to be.  Ho-hum.

Much better was the short back-up story, "Sally Fourth" in which Sally meets a man who has been married three times, always to women named Sally.  If she marries him she will be, as the title suggests, his fourth Sally.  He seems like a lightly prospect but Sally is unnerved by the fact that he has been married so often and he seems more interested in her for her name than anything else.  He says all the Sallies are just a coincidence so she decides to test him.  She reveals to him what she calls her greatest secret; that Sally is really a nickname and that her real first name is Hortense.  It's not true but when her new beau suddenly loses all interest in her, she knows he's not the guy for her.  She tells Buddy and Rob all about it over lunch in a restaurant and when the guys say they don't fully believe a guy could be that hung up on the name "Sally," our Sally points to the lunch counter where Guess Who is hitting on a waitress named Guess What.