We have previously seen Diana Dane receive two spankings from her father (Diana Dane #1 and Diana Dane #2). Both were well-deserved, and proceeding three more years into the run of Oh, Diana! to 1941 we find (or Sweetspot did) Diana receiving yet another well-deserved paternal spanking!
Notice that Angelica has a bratty attitude, but fortunately for us Diana admits that following her father to Tupper's Lake was her idea, not Angelica, so it's Diana who gets the OTK treatment!
Oh, Diana!, 07/07/1941 (click to increase in size). Art by Don Flowers.
Oh, Diana!, 05/04/1938 (click to double-size). Scans by Sweetspot as enhanced by Web-Ed.
Once again Flowers' OTK positioning is excellent, and it is amazing how much shape he's able to give Diana's behind with only a single line - and while she's wearing a black skirt! Black clothing is almost the bane of our existence when it comes to spanking - countless videos have made the mistake of allowing the spankee to wear black, which means that you can't see the shape of the target area at all clearly. And of course countless other spankees in black & white comics have worn dark skirts and dresses. Flowers even manages without a line midway between the hips (i.e. starting right where the backbone ends) to delineate the buttocks, although this may be one reason why his females are less obviously sexual than "good girl" artists of the day like Matt Baker. We will return to this question when we've seen some of Flowers' work on Modest Maidens/Glamor Girls in our next installment of this series.
Flowers began his career with Puffy Pig and Diana Dane in 1930, coming up at about the same time as Milton Caniff and Al Capp, both of whom he knew but who don't seem to have been influences on his style. His big break came the following year, 1931, when he created Modest Maidens (also for Associated Press Features). Although Flowers continued drawing Oh, Diana! for what appears to be 12 years until 1942 (there is some uncertainty as to the exact date), he actually hated the strip and much preferred working on Modest Maidens. The reason he could no longer handle both assignments was that AP had come out with a full-color Sunday section, requiring him to spend more time doing longer strips.
Oh, Diana! was continued by Bill Champs and Phil Berube and later on by other artists. Although largely forgotten today (even most of our reference books ignore it), it had a decent run. The exact date it ended is still uncertain; we have seen two references that give the ending year as 1953 but Sweetspot has found conclusive proof that it was still running in 1954. We'll hazard a guess that the rather poor quality of the strip by that time, coupled with it being caught between excessive preachiness on one hand and moral looseness on the other, caused readers and editors to drop it right around this time. Sweetspot has even found a written explanation by one editor as to why he dropped the strip (it wasn't wholesome enough) - see the entire story on the bulletin board.
Now let's see two examples from the strip's later days, selected by Sweetspot as he was attempting to resolve these questions. The first is a silly put-down of Biff's "lovemaking" (not a synonym for sexual intercourse at this time), and admittedly does not establish Diana's "looseness" by any means, although we think we're still on the right track as far as editorial perceptions went in 1953-54. The second involves dope peddling (they're against it), and to our mind the writer and artist did this storyline precisely to deflect any charge that Oh, Diana would lead youngsters into immoral behavior. Of course it's also possible this was an early example of "social relevance" in which art was used in an attempt to tackle some social issue - the quickest way to render it boring and irrelevant (see TV series like The Name of the Game and Quincy, or the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow, all of which are immensely tedious).
The art here is plainly not as good as Flowers' and the storylines are nothing to write home about.
Oh, Diana!, 05/03/1953.
Oh, Diana!, 03/01/1954. Scans by Sweetspot, posted by the Web-Ed on 06/02/2017.
So Oh, Diana enjoyed a long second act after the Don Flowers era, but eventually petered out without any more spankings. If the strip is remembered in the future, it will be for only two things: Don Flowers' art and Diana getting three good spankings!
