Chicago Spanking Review

Candy Gets Spanked by Mr. O'Connor!

The remaining three spankings from Candy all involve Candy herself, which is fortunate because she makes a very good spankee - certainly better than Effie Gissel did last time. Here is the best of the three, from Candy #3 (Spring, 1948). It has appeared only once before, on SpankingPanels, who were the first to discover it (while we were still wasting our time trying to find spankings in Bulletman).

Our spankee-to-be, Candy O'Connor. Published by Quality. Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/12/2010.

Let's meet our spankee, Candy O'Connor. She certainly looks spankable enough, although writer/artist Harry Sahle was remarkably inconsistent, sometimes drawing her as a scrawny teen-ager, sometimes making her more womanly as seen here.

Candy was another teen humor strip inspired by the success of Archie. There were many Archie-imitators over the years, and Candy was probably one of the better ones. (They mostly had two-syllable names like "Archie", as if that were a necessary ingredient for success - no one tried "Joe" or "Zachariah". Sahle also did two others of these, "Ezra" and "Hickory", for Quality, and as a matter of fact did some earlier work for Archie Publications as well). But Archie was an original, something taken from life - Bob Montana based the strip on characters he had known in his own high school days. The imitators all brought us experience at second-hand, as imitators always do (in this case drawing on Archie instead of on life), which is why they never measure up to the original.

Anyway, Candy made a good spankee, though an atypical one. Most spanked women in comics fall into these familiar categories: (1) the bad girl (villainess), (2) the spoiled brat, or (3) the arrogant heiress/socialite/queen. Candy was a little different - she was a sometimes-obnoxious troublemaker whose exceedingly poor judgment and rash actions made her well-deserving of punishment.

The last page.

The plot here is perfectly silly, and we won't bother to relate all the details, but suffice it to say that Candy comes to the conclusion a protection racket is trying to muscle in on her father's store. In fact, the suspicious-looking man she sets the police on, Mr. Clark, is a legitimate and important business contact of her father's.

Mr. Clark seems to be the forgiving type, but something must be done about Candy, and Mr. O'Connor correctly decides that something is a good spanking! The OTK positioning isn's bad, although Sahle shortchanges us (as readers as well as spankos) by making the spanking panel much too small. In fact, layouts were obviously not a Sahle strong point, for the preceding panel would have been much stronger (and more exciting!) if we could see Candy's entire face when her father says, "I'll take care of Candy!" A good reaction shot, where Candy's expression says "Uh-oh - I'm gonna get it now!", was obviously the way to go, yet Sahle shows us less than half her face!

The final two panels, slightly enhanced by the Web-Ed.

Here are the last two panels again. It's really a pity that Sahle goofed by making the spanking panel so small, because he does the OTK positioning pretty well, giving us a nice view of Candy's raised rear end. But the final panel in a story deserves more than the 1/12 of a page that Sahle allotted it, even when there isn't a spanking, and when there is, it definitely should be more than 1/12 of a page!