We had never heard of Bela Lanan, Court Reporter (1936 - 1941) until we saw this episode at SPK Comics. It seems to have been a rather odd comic, beginning with a supposed lead character, Bela Lanan, who bears a Hungarian first name and is never much seen. Here is what strip historian Allan Holtz has to say about it:
"The strip was originally titled You Be The Judge when it first appeared on July 6 1936, but apparently someone else had that name tied up, so it was renamed to the listed title on October 5 of that year. Despite the name change, some of the marketing material for the strip continued to use the original title for years afterward. As an interesting bit of trivia regarding the title, I don't believe Mr. Lanan was ever actually heard from in the strip, though presumably the stenographer that can often be seen in the Saturday episode is our title character."
In "How to Manage Women" we are presented with the case of Art Davidson, who when faced with an ill-tempered wife decided to cut some switches and apply the traditional remedy for bad behavior. He winds up in court, like a number of real-life spanking husbands we'll be seeing in the future in Sweetspot's Newspapaper Gallery, but since we don't have the judge's decision handy we might as well focus on the spanking. (Note: each case was presented Monday through Friday with the decision rendered on Saturday as a text column rather than a strip! Very strange.)
Art Davidson spanks his unruly wife and gets hauled into court. Bela Lanan, June 1 to June 5, 1939. The writer is L. Allen Heine with art by Robert Wathen, neither of whom have any other known comics credits. Scan by Andre at SPK Comics. Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/15/2019 (Click to increase in size).
The spanking panel from June 2, 1939. Scan by Andre.
CSR has been around long enough we hope it's not necessary to us to reiterate that we do not believe in wife-beating or true spousal abuse. Unfortunately, there are those who view even a consensual spanking relationship as abusive, and if the spanking isn't technically consensual they get really unglued. What we are discussing here is spanking at very safe levels of intensity that cannot cause any physical harm, and we have seen many times, at least in comics, what we call "retroactive consent" where the spankee, completely tamed by the act, becomes very attracted to the spanker. When we were young, spanking your girlfriend was common practice and was accepted even by the girls who did not agree with it or like it. Nor do we consider this the least bit unhealthy.
Unfortunately the writer here, L. Allen Heine (! - adding an "i" to his last name gives
"Heinie" 
) seems to belong to the "All
spanking is abuse" camp and presents the spanker in a very unflattering light - he
even resembles Adolph Hitler, which is about as subtle as dropping an anvil on the
reader's head.
