From Nights of Horror #6 (1954), exact publication date unknown. Taken from Secret Identity and posted by the Web-Ed on 03/29/2013 (click to double-size).
Here we have the second spanking from "Slaves of Gerardo" in Nights of Horror #6. This time Gerardo forces the spankee to bend over to receive the whip. Shuster's artwork is still good as pure drawing, but no OTK positioning and a very butch-looking spanker make this a decidedly lesser work. No bare bottom this time, but even so you'd think this kind of material would draw the attention of the censors, especially when coupled with the writer Clancy's more extreme fantasies, and you'd be right.
Now, just at the time Nights of Horror was being published (June - Sept. 1954, as best we can tell), concern over the causes of juvenile delinquency had reached a fever pitch, and the outcry against comics that supposedly had a corrupting effect on youth resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority (see our article The Effects of the Comics Code, Part 1 for more on this). If some people were that concerned about "crime" comics, you can imagine how they felt about Nights of Horror! New York City passed a new censorship law that targeted not only comics but also magazines and books, and the city's lawyers needed a test case to see if this law could withstand a court challenge. Nights of Horror provided them with exactly what they were looking for - material so vile (we're not talking about the spankings here) that angry emotions might cloud the judgments of people who supposedly lived in a free society where the government was not empowered to ban books of which politicians disapproved.
Next time we'll see how the forces of morality struck, and how one bookstore refused to go down without a fight.
