Heart Throbs #4 (February 1950). No cover artist since a photograph was used. Published by Quality. Posted by the Web-Ed on 02/03/2017 (click to double-size).
The romance genre hadn't been around for long before Quality Comics got on the bandwagon, and by the time Heart Throbs #4 came out in February of 1950 they were publishing several other titles as well. Heart Throbs must have been a good seller, for it was with them right up to the end in 1956.
The cover blurb, "...No man could withstand my charms for I would do anything for money!" sounds promising at first - a girl like that certainly deserves a spanking - but on closer examination it really makes no sense, and it appears the writer simply pieced together two separate teaser lines ("No man could withstand my charms!" and "I would do anything for money!") into one incongruous sentence. And "I Would Do Anything for Money," the issue's lead story, does not contain a spanking. Fortunately, the second story, "A Private Matter" does!
This story is six pages long, but we need only concern ourselves with four of them. We meet our principals in the splash panel: Colonel Carson, his rather stuck-up daughter Claire Carson (our spankee-to-be), and the Colonel's new driver Private Rick Ralston.
Claire makes the mistake of judging a man by his rank and speaks to him as though he's a servant. But Ralston is not impressed, and tells her off. Claire is determined to put him in his place:
"And so proud and haughty Claire Carson drove down to the kitchen to amuse herself at the expense of the young soldier!"
Sounds like someone needs a spanking!
A word of advice to all those women out there (and there are a lot of you) who deserve to be spanked: do not suggest to any of the men in your life "I think you should take disciplinary action!" as Claire does here. You just may wind up over his knee:
The spanking is an effective one, for it produces both tears and sincere repentance. Claire is determined to apologize to Ralston, but he's not really in the mood to listen, and Claire's hope for a romantic relationship are dashed. Several months pass, and Claire in a moment of despondence accidentally rides her horse (rather improbably) onto an artillery range. Her leg injured by a fall from her horse, Claire can't get out of danger, but fortunately for our story, Ralston realizes her predicament and rescues her in a jeep:
Realizing he does care for her after all, Ralston proposes marriage, so once again a happy outcome is the result of the age-old practice of spanking girls who need it! The story is somewhat weakened by Ralston's desire to leave the army and become a lawyer, which rather undercuts its earlier message that a man's worth not being determined by his rank (i.e. status) in life, but nonetheless must have been enjoyed by many a girl reading it at the time. Feminists would no doubt resist admitting it, but the fact is girls could and did identify easily with a fictional heroine who wound up OTK getting a well-deserved spanking, and they still would today if given a chance to encounter similar plotlines in today's fiction. In fact, they probably still do in those few venues where political correctness is not the exclusive rule. We think that explains the occasional spanking in contemporary romance novels and T.V. soap operas.
Let's take another look at the spanking panel. Although the composition is not ideal, it's not bad either: Claire is firmly positioned over her father's knee, her arms flailing helplessly and her legs kicking wildly enough to knock over a waste-basket! And we get an actual "Sob!" after an "Ouch!" indicating that tears are beginning to fall (as is confirmed in the next panel), so she obviously is feeling some real sting! Two problems are what we don't see: one arm covers up most of her face, while the visual effect used by the artist to indicate stinging (which strongly resembles that in the Batman/Marcia Monroe panel) obscures her fanny. In the ideal spanking panel, the spankee's face and fanny should both be visible.
As is usual with comics of this era, the credits are unknown. The indexers at Grand Comics Data Base have hazarded a guess that the artist may be Gill Fox, but their identification isn't positive and we can't offer an opinion since Fox had the gift of changing his style almost at will (his Bill Ward imitation on Torchy is so good it's impossible to tell the two men apart). We would agree that the rendering of Claire's face is consistent with some of Fox's known work, but that's as far as we can go.
