This one I was saving for a rainy day - and it's raining buckets here. A couple of years ago, Andrew Peopy wrote an excellent article for Hogan's Alley #16 about a 'lost' comic strip by Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo. My Friend Irma was the official comic strip version of the popular radio show of the same name. It was started in September 1950 by Jack Seidel, but by 1952 it had becaome clear that not enough papers had adopted the comic strip about a dumb blond to sustain it. Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo had been doing the comic book version for Timely with a lot of succes (enough to continue it for a ong time and prduce a couple of spin-offs in a similar style, like Nellie the nurse by Howie Post or Hedy in Hollywood by Ed Winiarski, written by Stan Lee. Andrew based his article on a strays month of dailies that were found somewhere, looking very similar to the comic book version. When Stan & Dan (as they signed the comic books) started or when their run ended, was not known. I looked everywhere I could online but did not find anything ele than some months of Jack Seidel work, which I showed here. All it proved was that Seidel was not as good at the dumb blond jokes as Stan and did not draw as sexy as Dan.
Last month I took out a subscription to yet another online newspaper source and this time I got lucky. I found a run of My Friend Irma that ran longer than the ones I had seen previously. From this I was able to see that Stan and Dan started on June 1 (well actually June 2, because JUne first was a Sunday and this was a daily only strip) and ran at least for the rest of the month. The probable end date was given to me by another collector at the Hogan's Alley Facebook group. In the actual newspaper source he could acces the strip stopped about three weeks in to August. That means Stan and Dan only did a very short run. So short in fact, that it makes me think they were filling out a contract for the syndicate, rather than tying to revive the strip.
Here's my month.
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