© Fawcett Publications. Posted by the Web-Ed on 06/18/2010.
You know, we really don't dislike Captain Marvel Jr. As superhero spin-offs go (and he may actually have been the first), he's one of the better specimens. And yet, looking over his adventures is a frustrating experience. Is it too much to ask that when there's to be a spanking in one of his adventures, the spankee be female? The last time we looked in on him, his enemy Sivana Jr. was being spanked by a robot. Now as we kick off a new series of Marvel Family Spankings, we find him giving the boot to Goering and spanking Goebbels on the cover of Master Comics #42 (September 1943).
We don't object to metaphorically spanking the Nazis, which we suppose is what was intended here - in September 1943 the country was less than two years into World War II and the tide had not yet turned in our favor - but spanking them literally, or even just using them as comic-book bad guys tends to trivialize the magnitude of their crimes. Still, given the young age of most comics readers at that time, maybe presenting the Nazis as stock villains for superheroes to beat up on is the best we could expect. Yet there were other than moral pitfalls with this approach: one purely commercial problem was that once the war finally ended in 1945, most superheroes were so tied up with it in the public mind that few could survive the early postwar years (CM Jr. and the rest of the Marvel Family were an exception, by the way, and only ceased publication when Fawcett got tired of fighting DC in court).
A second problem (for us spankos) is that since almost all the prominent Nazis were male, we're deprived of the M/F spankings we desperately want to see. Of course we haven't seen all the old Captain Marvel Jr. comics yet, so maybe there's a pleasant surprise waiting for us out there somewhere. And we have found two spankings given by Captain Marvel Sr. which we'll present as parts 3 and 4 of this series.
