"Daddy, aren't you taking yourself a bit too seriously?" No, we don't think so! Art by Don Flowers. Posted by the Web-Ed on 06/16/2017 (click to double-size). © King Features Syndicate
Our second example from Don Flowers' Glamor Girls was also discovered by Dave Wolfe. The date is August 12, but the year is unknown. As a matter of fact, we can't even prove that this is from Glamor Girls and not Modest Maidens, but that is our suspicion and since they're really both the same strip done at different times for different syndicates, that question is less important than the date.
The OTK position is good, but just as we saw in Glamor Girls Spanking #1 it's somewhat flawed by the spanker's knees being too far apart to allow the spankee to be well bent at the waist. The spankee is quite attractive, however, and the sheer elegance of her shapely legs adds a lot to the overall effect.
The gag isn't much. Most young women are reduced to the state of little girls when receiving a disciplinary spanking from Daddy or a similar authority figure, but this one has a bad attitude that requires further adjustment. This bad attitude turns out to be typical of Flowers' women, so let's see a couple of further examples.
Two bad wives who could use a good spanking! Art by Don Flowers (click to double-size). © King Features Syndicate. Scanned from Web-Ed's bound collection published by Fantagraphics Books.
The wives in the two cartoons above are practically begging to get their backsides tanned! A marriage counselor is mentioned in both, which makes us think of Humorama's four cartoons where the counselor recommends an OTK approach (Marrige Counsellor #4 et. al.), and that brings us to the consideration of what might have been had Flowers contributed any spanking cartoons to Humorama. Certainly editor Abe Goodman would have been receptive - he'd probably have been ecstatic! Flowers would have taken his place alongside the Big Six (Ward, Wenzel, Stiles, DeCarlo, Homer, and Morrice), but with his own style and one big difference: we have to imagine his spankees would have all been almost pure brats like the two wives or the daughter in his spanking cartoon above. Humorama's legacy would be even greater than it is today. So why didn't any of this happen?
An example of a Glamor Girls cartoon that would have been at home in a Humorama digest. The play being staged may not be historically accurate, but it does provide an excuse to put a pretty young woman in bondage (click to double-size). © King Features Syndicate.
We believe the answer lies in Flowers' success with Glamor Girls coupled with the low rates paid by Humorama. We don't know exactly how much Flowers was taking in with the strip, but he was making $75.00 per week in the early 30's, and assuming this figure increased gradually for at least ten years before Hearst doubled it (see our explanation of how Modest Maidens became Glamor Girls in Glamor Girls Spanking #1), we'll guess he was making at least $350 per week or more during the mid-1950's when Humorama's classic period began. Humorama's top rate of $15 per cartoon could not have seemed very enticing by comparison (Dan DeCarlo left Humorama just before its classic period ended to work full time at Archie), and Flowers probably had very little time for outside work. Certainly he was better off financially than Bill Wenzel, who was never able to fully support his family from his many high-quality cartoons. (Mrs. Wenzel worked to fill in the financial gap).
As a matter of fact, we believe we did see one Flowers cartoon in a Humorama digest, but it was years ago and we didn't bother to record the details since it wasn't a "spanker". It is certain that Flowers did no significant body of work for Humorama or any of the other men's humor magazines of the era that we have come across. We know that Flowers' income was reduced in the 60's as the number of papers that carried Glamor Girls shrank, but by that time Humorama had gone mostly reprint and wouldn't have been buying from him anyway.
The cartoon at left is rather atypical of Flowers and would have fit right in at Humorama: Puritan disciplinary methods provide a ready if incredible excuse to put a young woman in bondage and show off her legs (we're pretty sure that short skirts were not around in 1650 either). Interestingly, the young lady doesn't seem to mind her predicament too much! So Flowers, who like so many other cartoonists was apparently not into spanking but only saw its humorous potential, could have sold non-spanking cartoons to Humorama as well - but it was not to be.
Glamor Girls hits the beach (click to double-size). © King Features Syndicate.
Let's return to the subject of Flowers' style. As we mentioned last time, Flowers was not a "Good Girl" artist - his women are lovely and elegant but a little too cold and angular to ever really be obtainable. As attractive as they are, they are still somehow more idealized than sexualized. Looking at the girl in the bikini in the cartoon at left, her none-too-round buttocks are as obscured as they could be while wearing this style of swim suit: solid black color bottom, no line to delineate them, etc. For this reason, his spanking cartoons (and the theoretical ones he might have drawn for Humorama) were never as erotic as those of DeCarlo or Wenzel, for instance, who were careful to see that their spankees always had plenty "back there".
Let's take a look at a roughly contemporaneous work from someone with an entirely different approach and style, Frank Frazetta (below):
Story by Al Feldstein; art by Frank Frazetta. © William M. Gaines
There is a story that Frazetta was aided by Al Williamson with some of the background features in this tale, particularly the intricate supporting structure of the roller-coaster that figures prominently, but we don't think Williamson did any work on the figures. In any case, it was titled "Squeeze Play" and first appeared in Shock SuspenStories #13 (Feb-March 1954, published by EC Comics).
Here all the figures are highly sexualized, including that of the male (Harry), with the girl in the purple bikini being perhaps most emphasized in this regard. Her buttocks are clearly delineated and emphasized in panels 5 and 7, and even thrust out provocatively in the latter. This is the kind of girl all true spankos would love to see with her rear end upraised for spanking.
To us the essentials of Flowers' style never really changed, but like all artists he must have been somewhat influenced by what was going on around him. The cartoonist Bill Wray maintained that Flowers picked up "emphasis on thick and thin lines from Earl Oliver Hurst and Hank Ketcham" and we think some similarities to Ketcham may be present, particularly in the adult male characters of both cartoonists, but we wouldn't want to overstate the case.
Below we have examples from Ketcham's Dennis the Menace and Flowers' Modest Maidens. Ketcham's influence doesn't seem large here and we still see mostly Flowers in Flowers, although that may have changed slightly in his later years.
Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace. © 1977 Field Newspaper Syndicate (click to increase in size).
A spanking that should have been but wasn't quite. Note that Kathy is hitting her father with a doll, proof that (a) she still acts like an unruly child, and (b) she still needs a spanking. Don't give up, Pop - lay on that hairbrush! Art by Don Flowers. Scan by Sweetspot (click to increase in size).
Modest Maidens by Jay Alan (Feb. 3 of an unknown year; click to increase in size). From ComicArtFans Gallery.
The mention of Modest Maidens may have reminded readers that up to this point we've left a loose end: whatever happened to Modest Maidens after Flowers left it for Hearst and King Features Syndicate? The answer is that AP Features still owned it, so they got one of their staff artists, Jay Alan, to imitate Flowers' successful style (which he did pretty well) and continue the strip. It went on into the 50's, eventually being retitled as "Modern Maidens," leaving us with another question: were there any spankings in the Jay Alan years? At the moment we simply don't know, but we do think we saw some of Alan's work on the strip reprinted in Humorama! Small world.
A Glamor Girl she ain't. Art by Bill Ward (click to double-size). From Cartoon Fun and Comedy (July, 1976).
What happened to Flowers and Glamor Girls?. Times change, as they always do, but not always for the better, and if we may be permitted the editorial prerogative of editorializing, the 1960's were a chamber of horrors. The Glamor Girl, with her smartly-dressed elegance and unavailability, was replaced by sloppily-dressed or sluttily-dressed women who were, let us say, somewhat more available - sometimes on an hourly basis. Bill Ward, whom we referred to last time as the king of the Glamor Girls, adapted his subjects and his style accordingly, usually abandoning the highly-polished look he had developed using the conte crayon in the mid-50's at Humorama. At first his women still wore dresses (but without the satin-smooth appearance as he switched to fine ink lines, and certainly without regard to the more elegant-looking fashions of the time), but they weren't really "Glamor Girls" any more, and as time wore on they were often topless.
But Flowers was unable to adapt, and as we mentioned earlier his income fell as fewer and fewer papers carried Glamor Girls until it was down to less than a hundred (from more than 300 during its height). He complained to his son, Don Flowers Jr., that he wasn't making much more than he had been twenty years earlier at AP, and when he died in 1968 of complications from emphysema (he had had TB in the 40's and had always been a heavy smoker) he left no significant estate other than his house in Malibu, California. Glamor Girls was discontinued, but became a legacy of a different kind that will be remembered as Flowers influenced the next generation of cartoonists such as Sergio Aragones.
We don't know if there are any more spankings by Don Flowers, but if there are, we'll find them sooner or later and post them right here on CSR.
The CSR Don Flowers Checklist:
