The completely misleading cover of Blonde Phantom #20 (November 1948): none of the stories inside have Blonde Phantom in danger of falling down an elevator shaft, luckily for her. Luckily for us, her derriére was endangered in one of those stories by some nutty inventor's mechanical paddle! Pencils by Syd Shores; inks by Vince Alscia (identified by Nick Caputo). Discovered and posted by the Web-Ed on 06/02/2023 (click to increase in size).
CSR readers were introduced to the Blonde Phantom in The Spanker Paddles Blonde Phantom (Sensational She-Hulk #17, July 1990). That story took place long after (both in actual time and Marvel time) her days as one of Marvel's most successful Golden Age superheroines, and we felt impelled to cry out, "Why couldn't Louise have been spanked OTK back in the Golden Age, and in her old, sexy costume?" Well, it turns out she was, sort of, but only once in a crazy story entitled "Came the Spring".
The "Spring" in question is actually The Springer, a nutty cross between the old Superman villain The Prankster and the old Daredevil villain The Leap-Frog. He hops around on a pair of springs attached to his shoes (like the Leap-Frog), dresses like a goofball, and wears a manic expression on his face. He also reminds us of The Gag Man, whom we saw on the CSR Bulletin Board ten years ago in Bulletgirl Gets Her Seat Sizzled. That one took place in 1943, five years before the scene we're going to see now from Blonde Phantom #20 in 1948. Coincidence? You decide.
Fortunately, Blonde Phantom's stinging seat here was produced with an oversized paddle instead of an electified chair, which is what was applied to Bulletgirl's buttocks. BP followed The Springer to his house and rather imprudently enters through a suspiciously-unlocked door. But The Springer is lying in wait with several spring-operated devices: a huge spring-loaded paddle "helps" BP into the room, where a spring-loaded trapdoor lifts her and smacks her against the ceiling - completely bizarre! (And notice the errors in continuity as BP approaches the door through a darkened hallway, yet in the next panel she must have walked right by The Springer in a well-lit area to reach the wide opening leading to the trapdoor.)
"Yeeks!" exclaims The Blonde Phantom as a spring-loaded paddle "wham!'s" into her fanny - a very strange spanking panel.
Talk about ass-backwards! The ultimate purpose of the trap should have been to give Blonde Phantom a good paddling (and not with that diving board The Springer used) instead of merely using the paddle to gently nudge her onto that stupid trapdoor. Who thinks about smacking a woman's head and back against a ceiling, which is dangerously violent, when the opportunity for the humorous correction of a paddle to the behind is right there in front of him? Better a trap that had BP shoved into a spanking horse, bent over it, and swatted repeatedly (preferably by the villain himself). We have to wonder what the writer put into his script and how carefully the artist followed it; in other words, we'd like to know who to blame for this mixed-up mess but unfortunately the writer and artist are unknown. Only the fact there is actual paddle-to-fanny contact saves this one from being officially filed under Missed Opportunities, which in fact it is.
We've covered most of The Blonde Phantom's Golden Age appearances, but will diligently search through the remaining ones as they become available to us. To have a superheroine spanked in her own strip is a very rare occurrence, and we did have that here but we'd still like to see another, better spanking for her.
