Chicago Spanking Review

Crimes by Women #14

Crimes by Women #14 (August 1950). © Fox. Posted by the Web-Ed on 07/16/2010.

We begin a new series on spankings from a rather recently created website, SpankingPanels.com. The first three of these were new to us, and as far as we know, new to the web - original discoveries of SpankingPanels.com. A number of websites have featured comic-book spankings, including most obviously this one, but SpankingPanels is rather unique - they are exclusively dedicated to X/F comic spankings, and feature an elaborate rating system that almost defies description. You really have to see it for yourself, and we recommend you do so.

Now let's take a look at the first of these new spankings, in Crimes by Women #14, from August 1950. Judging the book by its cover, it would seem to be a lurid crime comic of the sort decried by Fredric Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent (more on Wertham here). We'd expect to encounter plenty of bad women like the ones seen here breaking out of prison, but not necessarily getting spankings although they certainly deserve them. As it happens, the spanking in this issue is only an illustration of an old law that allows a man to chastise his wife!

Here's the entire page which gives "Facts about Crime". Such filler pages were fairly common, especially if they were all-text because two such pages made the comic a magazine in the eyes of the Post Office.

03/28/2014 Update: Soothsayer made digital scans of a different copy of the book, so we decided to present it here (see below) even though this copy is probably not of as high a grade as the one used by SpankingPanels.

And here's the spanking panel by itself, referencing the law that forbids a man from using a stick bigger (meaning thicker) than the thumb. Strangely, the unknown artist drew the "stick" as an umbrella. Of course, being modern, enlightened people, we think this law is an inhumane relic of a bygone era - it should say that a wife may be given no more than eighteen strokes of a rattan cane no more than 3/8" thick!

03/28/2014 Update: The one-page filler, with the spanking, was reprinted in Startling Terror Tales #8 (February 1954). This seems rather odd since only 3 1/2 years had passed since Crimes by Women #14 had hit the stands. The reprint was published by the mysterious Star Publications at a time when horror comics had become extremely popular, and if it were not a non-horror filler page we'd be inclined to consider it the only known spanking scene in a horror comic. As it is, we'll have to maintain that up to this point no spankings have ever been discovered in any horror comic and that Star must really have needed some filler material.

Startling Terror Tales #8 (February 1954). Cover art by L. B. Cole. From the collection of and posted by the Web-Ed on 03/28/2014 (click to double-size).

Star has been of some interest to us since they published two other known spankings (Popular Teen-Agers #10 and #14) along with some blatant sexual innuendo (see Missed Opportunities in Star Comics on the CSR Forum). Ripley at SpankingPanels discovered some time ago that much of Star's output was reprint, so we have to wonder if those two spankings were reprinted from one of the Fox romance comics. Fox itself is less well-documented than we would wish. As for Star, history does not record its final days, but we will assume they were one of the numerous small publishers that could not survive the fall of American News Company in 1957 (note the "ANC" logo on the cover, indicating that ANC was their distributor).