The first issue of Nights of Horror (1954). Art by Joe Shuster (click to double-size).
We mentioned last time that Continental #1, to which Joe Shuster contributed a spanking drawing, aspired to be a quality publication. At least it was professionally typeset. Alas, the same cannot be said for Nights of Horror, which was simply typed up on a manual typewriter and printed in a basement. But meager production values alone don't tell the story - the content was sex and violence of a low order, heavy bondage and flagellation with other forms of cruel sadism mixed in, and we would pay it no heed at all on CSR if it were not for the fact that Shuster did all the art, some of which features only relatively mild spankings, and it is those we'll see as this series continues.
Issue #1 featured a story entitled "The Strange Loves of Alice" in which Alice is disciplined by a stern older woman called Miss Grundy (perhaps after the schoolteacher in the Archie line of comics). This is a pretty good spanking scene, although it's F/F, with the blonde Alice being taken firmly (if not too securely) across Miss Grundy's knee and her panties taken down so that she may receive the spanks on her bare bottom. This by itself might well have raised a few eyebrows in 1954, for as we have seen the spankings in the great Humorama cartoons, only months in the future, were never on the bare. If that wasn't enough to arouse the censor's ire, the more extreme scenes in Nights of Horror were bound to do so, and did. We'll have a little more to say about that as we go along in the series.
Why would Shuster, Superman's co-creator, be reduced to cranking out this kind of junk (the spankings excepted) for a publication like Nights of Horror sixteen years after Superman's first appearance in 1938? We'll find out next time.
From Nights of Horror #1, published sometime in 1954 and discovered by Craig Yoe. Taken from Yoe's book Secret Identity and posted by the Web-Ed on 03/08/2013 (click to double-size).
