At long last we're going to see Lena Pry actually taken OTK rather than merely getting her behind whacked in weak attempts at slapstick comedy! Our spanker is Daniel, whom we saw last time wielding the shingling hatchet that accidentally delivered the "spanks".
We mentioned at the beginning of this mini-series that one reason Lena Pry wsn't very good is that it was sold as a "topper" in a package with Jane Arden. We're going to show what that looked like here by presenting the two strips together just as they originally appeared in the Sunday comics. Jane, by the way, is a newspaper reporter much like Brenda Starr although she actually appeared first.
Lena Pry reprinted in the superbly-titled Crack Comics #25 (September 1942 - original strip date unknown). Script by Monte Barrett and art by Russell E. Ross. Scans by Freddy Firefly (thanks, Freddy!). Discovered and posted by the Web-Ed on 03/16/2018. © Register and Tribune Syndicate.
There is no discernible plot in this episode but Daniel decides to spank Lena for some reason, and
after suffering through her three previous slapstick scenes we expect the CSR reader is more
than ready to see her upended into the OTK position at last, whatever the reason
!
We don't know exactly who Daniel is, or why he wears a "Fu Manchu" type of mustache, or why Lena calls
him "Dan'l" - the attempts at dialect in this strip are odd and suggest to us that the writer,
Monte Barrett, may have been reading some of the lesser novels of Edna Ferber or another
American writer of the period.
Lena's character is a mixture of exaggerated dignity and pure mule stubbornness, which do make her a fairly likely spankee. Was she ever spanked again? We don't know as we don't believe all of Jane Arden has ever been reprinted, at least not in the sources available to us (Famous Funnies and Crack Comics). Perhaps a more interesting question at this point is, was Jane Arden ever spanked? We'll try our best to answer that question someday.
The spanking panel. © Register and Tribune Syndicate.
As this will probably be our last look at Lena Pry, let's exit by taking another look at the spanking panel. It's fairly well-composed by artist Russell E. Ross, with good OTK positioning, and Ross gives Lena a more subtantial fanny than Jack McGuire gave her in the earlier strips. Lay on those spanks, Dan'l!
