The third and last spanking for Patsy Walker in her own title occurred in Patsy Walker #41 (July 1952). It is unfortunately off panel like the first one, but is still of some interest because of (1) Patsy's on-panel spankings (two known as of this writing), (2) her importance to early post-war Marvel comics (the superheroes were gone and she was probably their most popular teen character), and (3) its similarity to both that first spanking and that of Nancy Brown. A tip of the hat once again to Robin for bringing these to our attention.
Our story revolves around Mr. and Mrs. Walker's wedding anniversary, and begins with Patsy lamenting to her boyfriend Buzz Baxter that her parents won't be having an anniversary party this year:
No party for Patsy's parents this year. © Marvel Characters Inc.
© Marvel Characters Inc.
Patsy manages to convince her parents that their friends are going to be disappointed at having no party to
go to this year. We'll skip over the pages where Mr. and Mrs. Walker go through all kinds of work to prepare for
a last-minute party. However, Patsy's plans go wrong when it turns out that all their friends already have
previous engagements and can't come to the party. Uh-oh! Patsy's in trouble now!
© Marvel Characters Inc.
Yes, it's pillow-strapped-on-the-behind time for poor Patsy. © Marvel Characters Inc. Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/18/2022.
The post-spanking panel. Patsy must have received a double-dose of parental discipline! © Marvel Characters Inc.
Not a bad story by the standard of the teen humor genre. The story and pencil art are still being done by Al Jaffee (possibly the inking as well), whose style has evolved considerably since Patsy Walker #7, which was the last time Patsy wound up with a pillow placed strategically on the seat of her dress. Unfortunately, this device, which was suppposed to be humorous, deprives us of an actual spanking panel. I suppose we'd all rather have seen Buzz spank Patsy for some reason, but as far as we know that never happened (our research on the Patsy Walker titles is still continuing as of this writing (late 2022)).
We should probably point out the similarity to Patsy Walker #3 also, in that not only do we have a pillow-panel, we also have by implication a two-on-one spanking with Patsy getting a double-dose of parental discipline. This is interesting since Jaffee had not started his run on the title yet - could these two plots have been suggested/outlined by Stan Lee? That's something we're destined never to know.
One final note: readers will observe that Patsy now has red hair instead of the auburn color used in her earlier issues. (Surely CSR Resident Artist HugoB00m will approve!) Why? We don't know, but it was likely a combination of two things: (1) the popularity of Archie Andrews led to a number of red-headed teen characters in excess of what would be proportional to the incidence of red hair in the general population, and (2) when Patsy first made the scene, Marvel already had a female red-head called Cindy, who was eventually dropped in favor of the more-popular Patsy. That freed up an opening for another red-head in the Marvel line-up.
