Script by Stan Lee; art by Jack Kirby. © Marvel Comics Inc. Posted by the Web-Ed on 04/02/2010
For the third entry in our series "Marvel Spankings That Didn't Quite Come Off," we have this example taken from Fantastic Four #38 (May, 1965). In this case the spanking intent is absent, with Sue Storm (The Invisible Girl) apparently falling by accident almost over Ben Grimm's (The Thing) knee. Why Kirby composed the panel this way is hard to say - we don't have this issue in our personal collection and we could not find a picture of the panel preceding it. From the panel following (see below), it may be that Kirby was trying to prepare for the "girl toss" of the next panel without having Ben catch her in a way that might seem too rough (and when viewing that next panel, remember that Ben is tossing her to Reed Richards, whom he knows with his stretching power will be sure to catch her gently). It's very unlikely that he intended to suggest a spanking - though he probably considered the paternalistic spanking of younger women to be o.k. in limited circumstances, as men of his generation ordinarily would have, there is absolutely no indication that Kirby was a closet spankophile. He was so well-known that had he done any secret spanking drawings (as any spanko artist surely would) they would have surfaced by now.
We don't know where this came from; since the panel has been inked and lettered but not colored, it is presumably a scan of the original art.
