Chicago Spanking Review

---> Art Gallery Special Feature

Who Was the ACES Artist?     Part 2

By Web-Ed

In Part 1 we saw twenty-three examples of the ACES Artist's work. In Part 2 we're going to examine some of them more closely along with some taken from what I believe to be the same artist's work at Marvel Comics. During this process, we should bear in mind that apart from the Artist trying to conceal his identity, he also spent less time on his spanking drawings and inked them himself, which of course would lead to some differences from his pencilled work that was inked by others at Marvel. The reproductive/printing processes would also have been somewhat different, and it is fair to say that some of the original details in the art were lost when they were scanned (or first photocopied and then scanned). A few of these details can be seen restored in the scans from Spank Hard I did myself with modern equipment.

To get ahead of the game we're going to have to look at some heads, because that's where certain stylistic trademarks are easiest to observe. Below we have three heads, first in their original versions and then with a yellow mark to indicate what I'm going to call the "Right Angle Feature" that is critical to the identification of our ACES Artist. At first I thought that the rather rectangular shape of the heads was significant on its own because of my belief that artists were trained to begin drawing the head from an oval shape, but I gradually realized that many other artists tend to shape their heads the same way the ACES guy does.

I'm not an artist myself and can't draw anything, but I'm good with geometrical shapes and I'm a careful observer. On top of that I can remember not only the dialogue from comics I read years ago, which doesn't help much with this project, but I can still visualize many of their individual panels, which allows me to search through old comics with a definite goal in mind (finding a particular scene) rather than just paging through them at random. That is how and why I began to home in on Fantastic Four and finally hit paydirt with what I call "the Right Angle Feature" (hereafter "RAF"), an actual right angle (in perspective) drawn in a thick line that defines the front and top of the cheek. Used with male characters, it complements the rectangular head to give strong, handsome, masculine features. Four examples appear below:

Head from Aces #12. The Right Angle Feature is a right angle drawn with a thick line, indicated by an adjacent yellow marking, and here appearing on both sides of the face.

Head from Aces #16.

Head of Reed Richards taken from Fantastic Four #114 (September 1971).

Pencils by ?; inks by Frank Giacoia.

Another example from Fantastic Four #114. This time it's the Human Torch, Johnny Storm, showing the RAF.

ACES #1 head (left) compared to Reed Richards (right).

To my surprise I soon realized that some of the ACES figures bore a resemblance to these Marvel characters that was more than stylistic - they were close enough to be actual liknesses! Here I have reversed Richards' head to better compare it with that of ACES #1, in which the RAF is absent, either because of the unusual overhead camera angle or in an attempt to hide the Artist's actual style. I believe he did this on some occasions while on others he breaks the RAF into two disconnected parts, again because of the camera angle or to disguise his style.

What is more significant here is the hair. Now the darker, shaded parts of the men's hair are not identical by any means, but they are noticeably similar especially when we remember that two different men are doing the inking. (Frank Giacoia inked Richards while the ACES Artist inked his own pencils. Or possibly drew in pen to begin with, impossible as that sounds to the amateur. I remember one of Wally Wood's assistants, I think it was Bhob Stewart, recalling his amazement at seeing Wood do a comics page that way. Penwork is a lot harder to undo than pencil lines if any mistake is made, but of course Wood had an unusually sure hand and the ACES Artist was also known for his outstanding draftsmanship, some examples of which we'll see later). Then there are the grey sideburns: while there are only so many ways to draw a man beginning to grey at the temples, even so the similarity here is striking.

Next, take a look at the lips and the chins: the lines defining them, basically three structures consisting of the opening between the lips, the thick line defining the top of the chin, and the very straight line at the bottom of the chin making it decidedly square-shaped, are almost identical, especially if allowance is made for the blurring of the ACES head due to low-resolution scanning. There is also considerable similarity between the right eyes and eyebrows of the two men.

Back to the hair for a moment: I'd forgotten about this second scan of Richards' head, despite having to go to some trouble to find a panel with a viewing angle similar to that of ACES #1, and it's a good thing I caught it because it may be that viewing angle that makes its likeness to the ACES head so striking. But I had also missed something else, and it has to do with the curl in Reed's hair that falls over his forehead: the curl is on the left side in the ACES drawing but the right side in the first scan of Reed Richards, so I didn't consider it a match. But I had forgotten that I had reversed the first scan, which means the curl is really on the left side of Richards' face, and this is confirmed by the second scan (which is not reversed since the "4" appears correctly).

I do believe we have a match!

ACES #1 head (left) compared with Reed Richards (different panel to give another viewing angle).

ACES #1 revisited - is this the Reed Spanking Sue panel we all wanted to see in Fantastic Four?

Another interesting thing will be noticed if we refer back to ACES #1 for a moment: the spankee has blonde hair! And yes, there are again only so many hair colors and we're further limited here to shadings only because of the black & white medium, but even so I have to suspect that our spanker/spankee pair are Reed Richards and his wife Sue! Perhaps this was unconscious on the Artist's part and perhaps not - as a writer I can affirm that sometimes a character as he or she is being brought to life may have an unintended resemblance to someone the author knows that is only discovered after the fact (although generally before the first draft is complete). Did something like that happen here? CSR readers are invited to weigh in on this question, to which we will return later.

Here is ACES #1 again so we don't have to refer back to Part 1. Is this Reed spanking Sue? Her hair is blonde and the correct length. I think it is, but of course we'll never be completely certain unless the original art shows up with some note on the back to that effect. That is extremely unlikely as we must imagine that the art was probably not returned to the Artist, and if it had been he wouldn't have kept it. Comics artists routinely sell their original art if and when it's returned, but in this case to he couldn't do that in the usual way without revealing his identity, although a private sale to a spanko collector would have been possible. He might even have kept it hidden, but if so it's never turned up as far as I know.

At this point, I think it's obvious that the man who pencilled Fantastic Four #114 and the ACES Artist are one and the same - and that means he's John Buscema! How stunned readers will be by this revelation depends on how closely they followed Marvel Comics during Buscema's decades of activity there (1948 - 1999 as best I can make out), which is an astonishing display of longevity. He was there when a real "bullpen" - a room full of pencillers and inkers turning out comics pages - existed in the Marvel offices, after which time (c. 1952) he and the other artists worked on a freelance basis. When Jack Kirby suddenly and unexpectedly left Marvel in 1970, he was probably the one man who could have filled Kirby's shoes on books like Fantastic Four and Thor.

I made the point before, and am about to make it again, that the male ACES figures are drawn in more detail than the female ones. Before I do so I'd like to present CSR Resident Artist Hugob00m's take on this matter:

"I might have a possible explanation for that. For source material, an artist can use live models/photos, or memory/imagination. Pin-up artist Gil Elvgren used to hire live models, pose them, arrange their clothing in the way he wanted, and then take their photo, so that they didn't kave to hold their pose for the entire time it took him to paint their picture. Some of those photos have surfaced recently. In his finished paintings, there would be details that he changed using his imagination.

"For the money that Humorama artists were paid [$15 max - Web-Ed], I don't suppose that many of them hired live models. I've speculated that perhaps some of them, such as Dan De Carlo and Bill Wenzel might have had their wives pose for them now and then. A lot of the Humorama artists who did spanking cartoons looked like they spent more time and effort with the spankees than the spankers. I have one example I'll share:

"The errant secretary is clearly the center of attention. I think he drew her first and added everything else as an afterthought. What really stands out is the beautiful shape of the woman's buttocks, and the shading that makes her look three-dimensional. The first thing I noticed about the man was the knowing leer. SHE thinks she's being punished for her spelling errors, but, nod nod wink wink, WE know he's just been looking for any excuse he could find to turn her over his knee and hike up her dress. It took me a long time to realize that his legs were wrong. Her lower ribs are supporrted by his left thigh... but her hips are levitating in front of his left knee.

"I think the ACES Artist used live models, or photos for the men and the backgrounds, but he if he was worried about being "outed" as a spanko, he would be hesitant to hire a female model and ask her to assume a pose that looks like she's ready for a spanking. I think he knew female bodies well enough to draw them from memory, but not in as much detail."

Let's pause for a moment and catch our breath before the final leg of our journey of discovery. Historically, once I had identified the RAF, I was sure I knew the ACES Artist was John Buscema but I still wanted more proof, if it could be had, before going public with this information. I finally got it from two different sources: first, Ed Lee revealed that the ACES Artist had done a lot of work for Marvel. I can't remember the exact context, but as I only had one or two private communications with Ed I imagine it was something he wrote in a Nu-West publication or on its website. Second, I happened upon two ACES drawings I hadn't seen before featuring a spanker and spankee who were beyond a doubt Marvel characters, and not from the Fantastic Four, either. Let's see them next:

ACES #6

ACES #7

"ACES - for well-spanked ASS"! That's what I call cutting to the chase! The same sofa appears in the second drawing (ACES #7) and it's the same spanker/spankee pairing, but the spanker has taken off the jacket he wore in ACES #6 - an article of clothing that turns out to be of vital importance - and rolled up his sleeves to apply the hairbrush. This would seem to imply some sort of progression in the spanking. Was this a simple set of two spanking drawings or was there a published story they accompanied? That's the same question we had with "ACES Check Series" in Part 1, and for now it must remain unanswered.

Now back to the significance of the jacket - the moment I saw it along with the spanker's face, I knew that both belonged to Peter Parker, while the "well-spanked ass" was that of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy! Yes, the Amazing Spider-Man himself was apparently taking some time off from being "Rocked by the Shocker" and "The Vulture's Prey" to star in "Spanked by Spider-Man," a story that would never have appeared in mainstream comics! Actually, Gwen's identification is only secondary, based on Peter's (the blonde hair is a clue, but as with the possible case of "Sue Richards" earlier not by itself a definitive one). As I noted in Part 1, the ACES male figures are better-drawn than the female ones, and I think the very fact that more time and effort was put into drawing the men inevitably caused them to bear more of the imprint of the Artist's true style - which in turn made it much easier to use them to identify him. "Gwen" here is drawn with minimal lines; the one delineating her buttocks is a little too sharply angled, and if she had been paired with a different spanker she would have been unrecognizable as any specific character.

Let's return to that rather ordinary-looking jacket: Peter was seen wearing it for a long time - at least from issue #39 when John Romita (Sr.) started drawing the strip to issue #90 (the last one I bothered to check as the exact issues aren't important here, only the fact that Peter was usually wearing it when he wasn't in his Spider-Man suit) - and Buscema would certainly have seen it even if he had never drawn it himself. As most of his time was taken up on other titles, he only worked on a few issues of Amazing Spider-Man and I could only find one "jacket" issue partly credited to him. Some examples are below:

I have taken the first two examples from B & W reprints of Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July 1967) to avoid the possibly confusing effects of Stan Golberg's coloring. © Marvel Characters Inc.

The art is credited to John Romita (Sr.) (pencils) and "Mickey Demeo" (inks - Mike Esposito using a pseudonym so DC wouldn't know he was moonlighting at Marvel). © Marvel Characters Inc.

From Amazing Spider-Man #66 (November 1968; colored version as reprinted in Marvel Tales #49 because I had no B & W reprint of this issue). Art by John Romita (layouts), Don Heck (pencils), and Mike Esposito (inks). © Marvel Characters Inc.

Even though other artists are responsible for these panels, Buscema would certainly have been familiar with their work and Romita's character designs on Spider-Man were considered definitive by this time, so Buscema would surely have been able to draw Peter with that jacket and probably did sketch it when he did the layouts for #78 (below).

Spidey #61 (June 1968) - Romita/Heck/Esposito. (Click to increase in size.) © Marvel Characters Inc.

Spidey #78 (November 1969) - Buscema/Mooney. Why Pete's jacket is now being colored brown instead of yellow is unknown. It could be that a different colorist (from Stan Goldberg) simply chose different colors, the colorist of this issue being unknown. (Click to increase in size.) © Marvel Characters Inc.

Two more examples now, after which some readers might wonder if Peter Parker had any other clothes (but of course in his fictional world very little time was passing). The one at left is from Amazing Spider-Man #61 with art by Romita, Heck, and Esposito and is a fair example of an expressionistic splash page (Gwen Stacy is at top left).

At right we have a page from Amazing Spider-Man #78 with art credited to John Buscema and Jim Mooney. The result looks more like Mooney than Buscema, so most likely Buscema did the layouts only and Mooney inked his own pencils. That is certainly unfortunate for our purposes but I really think my garment identification is still correct. If you were a Marvel Comics artist of that time (1969) and also a spanko, wouldn't you later draw Reed spanking Sue and Peter spanking Gwen or maybe MJ (without making it too obvious that's who these characters were)? Of course you would, and in Peter's case you'd probably draw him as you remembered him - wearing that jacket.

Given the involvment of so many other artists on Spider-Man, readers might reasonably wonder at this point if one of them could have been the ACES Artist rather than Buscema, especially when they learn what I now reveal: that Mooney is known to have done some B & D stuff including spanking! (In fact, he did a small number of Humorama cartoons also but no "spankers".) The answer is no, for Mooney, though he could pencil as well as ink, did both in a different style than we see in the ACES work, and the same goes for Don Heck. This is confirmed by Mooney's B & D work (which is unfortunately mostly femdom), where his style is unmistakable, and also by what we see in Spidey #78 above. Romita is perhaps a more difficult case, as his drawing of the human head has some characteristics in common with Buscema's, probably due to both men having been influenced by Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff. But there are some notable dissimilarities, beginning with the absence of the RAF in Romita's work, and once other aspects of their drawing are compared the many differences in their styles becomes obvious. Finally, Romita was very uncomfortable working on Fantastic Four (Mooney never did as far as I can remember) and would hardly have produced anything like ACES #1.

Could this be Betty Brant spanking Mary Jane Watson? (In comparing the characters, take note that on the right Betty is drawn by Steve Ditko and MJ by John Romita since I don't have any examples of Buscema pencilling either character).

In Part 1 I promised to revisit this F/F hairbrush spanking. The two characters from Spider-Man I saw a resemblance to in this spanker/spankee pair are Betty Brant and Mary Jane Watson. It's mostly in the hair styles, with MJ's bangs combed a bit to the sides, and Betty's short hair perhaps more obvious. It could be coincidence, of course, especially since Buscema had never drawn Betty (she had been written out of the series before he and others were called in to get some relief for the overworked Romita) and since if Betty had a rival while she was Peter's girlfriend it was Liz Allan, not MJ, but can all six cases of similarity (Reed/Sue, Peter/Gwen, Betty/MJ) be coincidental?

I nearly forgot to include ACES #18 in Part 1 but I remembered it (finally) only after I'd written Part 2 and spent all that time comparing the ACES figures to various Marvel Comics characters. Perhaps that's what inspired me to take another look at our spanker/spankee pairing here, and when I did I found some resemblance between the spankee and Patsy Walker, whom we've seen a lot of recently because she was spanked three times in her own book, mostly off-panel. (See the Patsy Walker Checklist for details). The resemblance isn't overwhelming by any means, but it's definitely there. I think the only question is whether it was intentional or not. (The spanker's resemblance to an older Buzz Baxter is weaker).

"Patsy" looks a little older in the ACES drawing, but her figure is the same as it was on the cover of Patsy Walker #55 (November 1954), from which I extracted Patsy and Buzz in black & white as well as the original color (art by Al Jaffee). Buscema never drew the strip, but he would have been in the Marvel Bullpen during some of the years that Jaffee was effectively editing the Timely teen-humor books, including Patsy Walker, which meant that Jaffee would have had to spend time around the Marvel offices when Buscema was there in the late 40s. None of this is conclusive, but it's just possible that the young Buscema could not help imagining the popular Patsy getting a bare-bottom spanking and put that image down on paper more than thirty years later. Of course, the resemblance could be unconscious, also, but I don't think it's merely a figment of my imagination.

Female head from ACES #26 flanked by Crystal of the Inhumans. Crystal is © Marvel Characters Inc.

"Two heads are better than one" they say, so let's play some more head games to see if we can find further evidence for our ACES identification. Here we have the spankee's head from ACES #26 juxtaposed with two drawings of Crystal from Fantastic Four #117 and #118. I wouldn't call the resemblance here definitive by any means; as a matter of fact I think it far more likely to be simply the unconscious product of the Artist's natural style. Despite some obvious differences in the hair and eyebrows, I do believe the stylistic similarity, which is very hard to describe, is significant even though I don't think this spankee is intended to be a disguised Crystal.

His customary approach, assuming I'm correct about it, was to more carefully conceal his style in his female spankees than in his male spankers, which may have resulted from a calculation that the guys reading spanking magazines would naturally spend more time looking at his less-identifiable female spankees than the male spankers. [Note: I wrote the preceding sentence before B00m had posted his own hypothesis that the Artist used references for the male figures but drew the females from memory. I'm leaving it as it was so readers can consider all the possibilities - Web-Ed.] I think it likely that Buscema enjoyed drawing these characters in disguised versions that only he was supposed to recognize. Risky? Perhaps it may seem so, but if he indeed took that conscious gamble, we must concede that it paid off since it was only decades later and long after his death (in 2002) that an obsessive yet extremely able spanko/researcher (ahem!), with a large supply of his comics work at hand, finally penetrated his secret.

Let's see a little more of Crystal now from Fantastic Four #132 (March 1973), primarily so we can better appreciate Buscema's abilities. Our story so far: the FF have traveled to the home of the Inhumans to help them fight Omega. At the conclusion of the battle, Crystal takes Johnny aside. The two had been lovers, but while separated by circumstance Crystal had begun seeing Pietro (Quicksilver) and now breaks up with Johnny, telling him she's going to remain there with Pietro. Johnny pretends not to be hurt, telling Crystal he has a date with an old girl friend that night, but we learn in the final panel that isn't true:

The final page of Fantastic Four #132 (Web-Ed's scan and collection). Script by Roy Thomas; art by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott - beautiful work! © Marvel Characters Inc.

The break-up came as something of a shock to me at the time, although nowhere near as great as that from Gwen's death in Spider-Man nine months earlier, but for the moment let's simply appreciate Buscema's draftsmanship in that final panel and his skill in laying out the scene so that half a page is allotted to it. How many times have we seen lesser artists use a tiny little panel when depicting a spanking - always the high point of the scene in which it occurs - thus losing a good deal of the powerful effect? That's not the kind of mistake Buscema would ever have made in his layouts, although as far as I know he didn't draw any spankings in his comics work (most likely because he always worked from a writer's script or at least a verbal outline of the plot).

Now back to comics melodrama for a moment: Crystal eventually married Pietro, but feeling neglected had an extramarital affair with a real estate salesman named Norm Webster! All together now: "Crystal deserves a spanking!"

That's why I remarked earlier that several men had certainly earned the right to spank her: first poor Johnny, whom she jilted after he almost moved heaven and earth to be with her; then Pietro, who even though he was something of a jerk deserved more fidelity from his wife; then Norm, whom she kind of took for granted, neglecting him at least as much as Pietro had neglected her; and finally Black Bolt, King of the Inhumans and her brother-in-law, for disgracing the royal family. (And speaking of disgracing the royal family, how is it that King Charles or Prince William hasn't done Harry's job and spanked Meghan Markle yet? And how is it that none of us at CSR seem to have thought of that before now? ) Even in the work of independent spanking artists, only one spanking for Crystal is known, and that one is at the hands of Sue Richards.

Bruce Banner believes that he killed Ben Grimm while he was The Hulk (he didn't). From Fantastic Four #113 (Aug. 1971; Web-Ed's scan and collection). Script by Stan Lee; art by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott. © Marvel Characters Inc.

One final example from the Fantastic Four, this time issue #113 (August 1971). I remember being struck at the time by how well Bruce Banner was drawn, better than in his own book even though he appeared only briefly in this issue. And this was when the art on The Incredible Hulk was being done by Herb Trimpe and John Severin, Severin being the best inker Trimpe ever had, in my opinion. Trimpe was a solid artist, but not in the same league as as Buscema. (Trimpe drew the Lunatik/Hellcat caning in Defenders #70, so he gets points for that).

Speaking of inkers, they made a great deal of difference in the days before digital art. Buscema's pencils had a delicacy to them (even though their effect was robust rather than delicate), and he needed an inker who was very transparent in his approach to going over the pencilled art. Giacoia and Sinnott were two such inkers, fortunately for us, because they carefully avoided stepping all over Buscema's pencils.

In judging these two panels, remember that they actually appeared better on the printed page because the scanner light was so strong we can see the art on the other side of the page. If you concentrate on what was printed on this side of the page, you'll see Banner's anguish through his unusually-handsome features - and it's likely that Buscema had never drawn Banner before.

ACES #29, "Speeding Ticket Spanking".

Let's enjoy one last ACES piece, an excellent example of OTK spanking art. It was certainly around on the web ten years ago so CSR readers may have seen it before although I believe at the moment this is its only residence. Somewhere it picked up the name "Speeding Ticket Spanking" which I have preserved but I do not know if this accurately represents the original intention. It could, but fortunately it doesn't much matter.

The OTK positioning is very good although slightly unrealistic as the spankee's hips are not over the spanker's lap, which in practice means she would tend to slide backwards, but in this position her legs can bend a bit further forward, preserving an angle close to 90 degrees. (In other words, she's bent over far enough but her body should be shifted slightly to the spanker's left). We don't have a view of the buttocks but in compensation we get a great look at her face - eyes closed and mouth open to cry "Yeoww!". Her head is up, arching her back, and her arms are relaxed in submission, but the sting is intense enough that she's kicking off her left shoe!

I had thought about comparing the spanker's head to that of the Spider-Man villain The Schemer, but because they didn't have much in common except for that odd streak of grey running down the center of their hair I decided against it. However, I had already prepared a blowup of the spanker's head so here it is along with the RAF, slightly suppressed with one short side:

By this time the (altered) style should be fairly recognizable.

Long-time CSR readers will remember Pablo, who has done many alternate versions of spanking art for us in the past (see for example Combat Casey #7 and Femforce #46 and who sent me these two alternate versions of "Speeding Spanking" (below) some years ago. Pablo specializes in (1) accentuating and baring the buttocks, and (2) altering the expressions. Thanks, Pablo!

Good as these are, the expressions in the original really couldn't have been improved upon. Also, it seems that Pablo was stuck working with a lower-resolution scan (I know there was one out there but I got rid of my copy when I realized I had the better one I posted here).

ACES #29 a/k/a "Wife in Trouble" as altered by Pablo, version 1.

ACES #29 a/k/a "Wife in Trouble" as altered by Pablo, version 2.

I certainly hope I haven't made any mistakes in these identifications. Some of them were quite difficult due to the factors I've already cited: different inkers, different reproduction/printing methods, and of course my belief that the Artist tried to disguise his style somewhat. I have covered several other possibile Marvel Comics artists of the Silver and Bronze Ages above, but there are a few other D & S artists who draw in a similar style, for example the prolific Alazar, as our own Wolfie138 has pointed out. Let's look at him for a minute.

We've seen very little of Alazar's art on CSR, not because I don't like it but because he makes his living from it. The two pieces I have previously posted are re-posted below. Immediately, we encounter the problem that Alazar works with more than one technique, and the two are very different. The second is much closer to the style of the ACES artist, probably because of the penwork (most of Alazar's recent work seems to consist of very fine-line pencil drawings), so let's concentrate on that one. It's a very nice drawing, certainly, but its style seems distinct from that of the Aces Artist. The closest match I can find is ACES #4, which I have placed underneath for comparison purposes.

Teacher gets a spanking! From Big Top Bondage by Alazar.

A very sexy and serious spanking by Alazar.

To me, the similarities boil down to the cleanness of the lines and the proportions of the figures. Alazar always draws nicely-proportioned female figures, slender and usually not too busty but still with shapely bosoms and behinds that I believe reflect his personal erotic ideal. The ACES artist draws similarly-proportioned women, although I think in his case this is as much due to a classical ideal of beauty as it is to his personal taste in women. Also, he delivers more background details (again I think due to classical training and/or influences) than does Alazar, who seems to be first, last, and always focused on the women! And while Alazar does excellent spanking art, on the whole bondage seems to be his first love, and we don't see that from the ACES Artist. (Not that we would from ACES itself or Nu-West, but if he had been into bondage, wouldn't some of that work have survived and been posted on the web by now?) And there is no RAF in any of Alazar's work that I have seen.

What about the historical timeline? Here we're handicapped by not having the original sources for most of the work that either later became decorated with the "ACES" logo or that followed some independent path to the web (e.g. ACES #8, 12, and 16). Alazar seems to have been active as early as 1982, and that might have been early enough as we can't be sure any of the ACES material existed before that time (Ray might know), and he was certainly very active during the 90s when some work from the ACES Artist appeared in Spank Hard and when Ray was doing Spanking Central. But while Alazar speaks of having drawn comics, the only ones we can sure of are the erotic books from the 90s (as published by Eros, for instance), and I find no record of him drawing any mainstream titles while we know that the ACES Artist worked at Marvel. Also, Alazar would simply have been too young back in 1967 to pay much attention to Peter Parker's jacket, if we accept my garment identification, and then remember it years later.

It's always possible that I've mis-identified a few of the twenty-four spanking drawings we've seen here as coming from the same Artist, and that Alazar or even someone else could be the artist "behind" those few, but it is not possible that someone else did all twenty-four. It would certainly be interesting to examine the original art for further clues that may have been lost in the printing process, but I imagine it's long gone now. The fact that we know the Artist worked at Marvel and the resemblance of some of the figures to Marvel characters leaves me pretty certain in my main assertion that the ACES Artist was John Buscema.

ACES #4. The spankees have some definite similarities, beginning with their open mouths.

To do justice to John Buscema's career in comics would require an article of its own. For our purposes here I merely want to ensure that any CSR readers who were not previously familiar with his work get some idea of just how good an artist he was before we end our journey through the ACES work. Without giving a detailed critique - and there must be some out there for those interested - below are two examples that show Buscema at his best. They are of course far superior to his spanking work, displaying careful craft and a lot of fine lines that must have taken a long time to draw. It's hard to imagine anyone else at Marvel at that time being able to bring out the sheer grandeur and spectacle of Thor (initially drawn by Jack Kirby) and Silver Surfer (created by Kirby), and as we saw with FF #132 he handled human drama superbly as well.

The cover of Thor #272 (June 1978). Pencils by John Buscema (pencil identification by Stephen Tice and Bob McLeod, confirmed by existence of signed art found by Web-Ed). Nick Caputo was not sure that Buscema had done the inks as well, but I believe the version at right, since it appears to be the original art and is signed by him, should be taken as determinative. Courtesy Grand Comics Data Base. © Marvel Characters Inc.

The original art for the cover of Thor #272. Art by John Buscema (signed). The art is so good you hate to see any of it obscured by the cover lettering. Thor is © Marvel Characters Inc.

Mephisto tempts Shalla Bal with a promise to re-unite her with the Surfer. The sense of evil and menace emanating from this character is almost palpable. From Silver Surfer #3 (Web-Ed's scan and collection). Script by Stan Lee; art by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott. © Marvel Characters Inc.

I do have a few more items with the "ACES" legend on them, and we will see them as soon as I can squeeze them in. I also have one F/F caning by "G. Fort" which I simply didn't see the need to include here, plus a low-resolution scan I can't positively identify. I suppose I should post all of these except those few that involve juveniles and/or are F/M - these will be available to CSR readers on request only.

That about wraps things up. I hope everyone enjoyed our little tour through some very nice spanking art and some Silver/Bronze Age comics history. I imagine there will be some discussion on the Bulletin Board, and I can always do a follow-up here if there are too many questions to be dealt with over there.