The cover of Radiant Love #5 (June 1954): "How could I know that my uncontrolled passion would lead to -- shame?" Well, that's the way "uncontrolled passion" usually turns out, honey. (Maybe she'd have been better off spanked rather than shamed, but as it happens she's not the spankee in this issue.)
It's been years since we discovered a new spanking in a romance comic book, but the drought is now ended thanks to a somewhat surprising find: Radiant Love #5 (June 1954), which was put out by a very small publishing company, Gillmor Magazines (listed as "Stanley Morse" in the Grand Comics Data Base). The name "Gillmor" seems to be an amalgamation of "Gilbert Singer" and "Stanley/Michael Morse," the three recorded owners of the company. They were active from 1951-56 with an apparent surprising and short-lived resurgence in 1971. Presumably, they were wiped out along with a lot of other companies by the collapse of the largest magazine distributor at the end of the Golden Age of Comics, an event we describe in the article The Effect of the Comics Code on Spanking Part 1.
Notice, however, that 1954 is two years before the dreadful 10-year long "spanking deadzone" of 1956-65 (described in Part 2 of the above-mentioned article) when the Comics Code had just been implemented but before Mrs. Guy Percy Trulock, who must have hated spankings, took over as Code Administrator in 1956. Therefore it is not entirely surprising to find a spanking in this issue, but unfortunately it's a rather mediocre scene as we'll see shortly. (Thanks to Mark Bowen for the scans.)
Our story is called "The Price of Love" and it's a little off the beaten path. Our heroine (and spankee-to-be), Donna Lewis, has taken up with a mobster named Lefty James purely for financial reasons. A reporter, an older man named Ed Wicks, goes to Donna for information about Lefty's activities but their conversation quickly turns to love. He points out that she doesn't understand the meaning of love, which is true since she's only with Lefty for the good life, but then shifts to her general moral upbringing which is certainly lacking.
ED: Without parents to guide you [how does ne know that? - Web-Ed] I guess it's tough to know right from wrong. If I were your dad, you know what I'd do?
DONNA: No Ed - what would you do? [She was foolish to ask this question!]
ED (taking her OTK): This!
DONNA: No! Don't! No -! [Yes!]
Well, ol' Lefty soon gets himself bumped off - in fact, it's shortly after the spanking - which is convenient for our
story although it gets rather implausible from that point on and the psychology is absurd. Not that we should care too much,
since the spanking is the important part to us. 
Donna wastes no time grieving over Lefty, even helping herself to his wallet. We consider that to have been a mistake on the part of the writer (one of many, but we won't list them all). She leaves the unnamed "big city" (probably New York) and moves to a small town upstate, where she meets a young politician named Robert Lindsey, who's running for Congress. If that weren't implausible enough by itself, she develops a solid work ethic and begins to learn the meaning of true love. Eventually, Spanker Ed tracks her down and convinces her that she can't marry Bob because his political opponents will use her connection to the late Lefty to destroy Bob's political career. Realizing that Ed was right, Donna leaves town (again,) and with no place else to go shows up on Ed's doorstep.
Donna sees Ed as a father figure and comes very close (in our imagination, at least) to embarking on a disciplinary relationship with him. "Maybe you can (sob!) help me...What would you do now, er, Dad?" What an opening! We'd rewrite the dialogue that followed thusly:
"I'm going to help you to keep doing the right thing with the guidance and occasional discipline you so obviously need. And don't worry - we'll get everything straightened out."
Donna does seem to be the type who needs the occasional spanking, and certainly getting turned over Ed's knee is the pivotal event in the story, so let's take another look at the spanking itself:
Now, there are two big problems here: the layout relegates the spanking itself to a small panel when it should be
the focus of the whole scene (a problem we've seen before), and the draftsmanship itself is not very good. (The
artist, like the writer, is completely unknown.) Donna's buttocks have almost no definition, so the reasonably
good OTK position is basically wasted. And of course this is essentially a paternal spanking, not a romantic one
with erotic overtones. We have seen similar scenes before in romance comics, for example in
Heart Throbs #4 (father spanks daughter) and
My Secret Life #26 (girl spanked by her older sister's
boyfriend), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with them, but of course they lack the erotic sizzle of a young man
spanking a young woman he's attracted to and who respects, admires, and loves him for spanking her. This one is different
because the story hinges on the spanking - Donna becomes a different person because of it, one capable of understanding love -
but it's rather badly executed. Of course, if the writing and art were better, they probably wouldn't have been found in the
fourth story in a 10-cent comic book. 
Anything else? Oh yes - are there any more spankings in Gillmore Publications or Stanley Morse's other brands. of which there were several? At the present time, there are none that we know of, but we're not sure we've searched every single title. We don't think we've missed anything that's been digitized, which would be most of them.
