Wonder Woman © DC Comics Inc. Joe Matt's derriere is © Joe Matt (unauthorized use of derriere prohibited). Posted by the Web-Ed 02/12/2010

Since we've been featuring "nerd spanking" over in the Gallery this week, it seems like a good time to present this nifty little animation, which was entitled "Wonder Woman Spanks Nerd" when we found it. We don't know who the colorist/animator is, or if he was responsible for the title, but it's actually a trifle unfair to the spankee, whom we recognized as the cartoonist Joe Matt and who isn't really a nerd. So how did a reasonably well-known humor cartoonist come to be placed over Wonder Woman's knee, you ask? Easy - he put himself there!

We well remember seeing the original B & W cartoon on which this animation is based drawn by Joe Matt himself in The Comics Journal in the early to mid 1990's. He had drawn himself over WW's knee receiving a bare-bottom spanking, surrounded by pornographic VHS tapes (the reason for the spanking). The intention was plainly humorous, and we don't think that Matt is a spanko since his work is heavily autobiographical and he couldn't have kept any significant sexual deviations out of it (and in fact he didn't). It is true that he does have a long obsession with porn, and it may well be that apart from the opportunity for humor, some inner guilt feelings caused Matt to draw himself getting the punishment that on some level he felt he deserved, and at the hands of a woman who represented all the women demeaned (as he saw it) by pornography - an oddly feminist perspective for a porn addict!

We haven't seen Joe Matt's work since the mid-90's. Our impression at that time was that he had the potential to become an absolutely first-rate humorist once he got past his ever-present solipsism. If you're interested in his work, we'd recommend any issue of Peep Show, some of which you can find at Drawn and Quarterly.

Colorized version of Joe Matt's original cartoon.

As far as that original cartoon goes, we've actually still got it somewhere - we read and saved every issue of The Comics Journal for about twenty years - but we couldn't plow through all those thousands of pages of back issues to dig it up. If we do ever manage to locate it, we'll post it here.

[10/22/2010 update] - although we still haven't found the original cartoon, we did recently come across a colorized version of it, which appears at left. Matt's signature and his porn tapes are now visible, having been removed in the animation.