An inconsiderate shopper is about to get her fanny warmed by a modern-day "executioner". From the December, 1982 issue of MAD magazine. From the collection of, scanned by and posted by the Web-Ed on 02/10/2023.
Just over forty years ago back in 1982 we were still buying MAD magazine on a regular basis, which is how we happened upon this cartoon. Apart from usually silly parodies of movies and TV shows (although the ones of Mission:Impossible and The Incredible Hulk were quite funny), MAD used to feature collections of single or multi-panel cartoons on a given theme, in this case "Promises from politicians we'd like to see them keep" or some such. (We don't remember the exact wording after all these years and we're not going to dig through our basement collection of MAD just to find out.) One of those promises was "to publicly flog anyone who holds up an entire supermarket line to write a check for a purchase of under $3.00." It's a pretty funny gag, at least for those who can remember when check-writing at grocery stores was common practice, long before credit cards (or EBT cards for those on the dole) started to be used. Indeed, the store would often agree to allow a check to be written for as much as $50 over the purchase amount, the balance being returned to the customer in cash, as a convenience because at that time (before ATMs, remember) getting cash otherwise required going into a bank and waiting at a teller's window.
If they didn't already know who he was, CSR readers were introduced to artist Al Jaffe recently in Patsy Walker #7. As we mentioned there, Jaffee contributed to MAD from 1955 all the way to 2020! He was a gifted humorist (look at the expressions on the spectators' faces here), although he had a lamentable tendency toward doing gross-out material, perhaps because he thought that would appeal to a young audience. The "executioner" here is shown with a shopping bag for a mask, the way executioners were commonly depicted in popular media (not necessarily historically accurate, but the humor is unaffected). The "AP" on his apron stands for "A & P" (the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company), at one time the largest chain of grocery stores in the U.S., now sadly defunct. (John Updike's celebrated 1961 short story "A & P" is set entirely in one of them, while their former house brand, Eight O'Clock coffee, still survives to this day, having become independent in 2003.)
Neither the position nor the implement, a cat o' four tails, is ideal but the effect is certainly humorous. Despite the spankings Jaffee did in Patsy Walker (and his authorship of the one in issue #62 is in doubt - refer to the comments and the entire Patsy Walker checklist on that page), there is no indication he was any kind of spanko himself. We've seen a lot of Jaffee's MAD cartoons over the years, and this is the only one we know of with a spanking.
