Lois hurts her hand - again. Script by Otto Binder, art by Ruben Moreira and Al Plastino. © DC Comics Inc.
This panel surfaced a while ago on the 'net, but without attribution - we didn't know who had posted it or where it came from. It was clearly a different scene than the one on the cover of Lois Lane #57, although it featured the same motif: Lois tries to spank a super-tot and ends up hurting her hand! [By the way, we'll mention here that it is because the spanking doesn't come off and no child is actually hurt that we don't consider this scene to come under CSR's "no children" policy. The fact that Lois hurts her hand can be seen as just punishment, although we'd still prefer that her punishment take the form of an OTK spanking given to her by either super-tot or super-dad.]
The story, "Mrs. Superman", involves the injured Lois dreaming about what it would be like to be married to Superman. This seems to have been before the spate of "imaginary stories" that DC ran in many of the Superman Family titles began. Of interest is Super-Tot's query, "You hurt hand again, Mommy?" [emphasis added]. Like Jonathan Kent, apparently Lois was a slow learner. We have to ask at this point just how many times did Lois try this? And as we'll see in the coming weeks, it was a lot.
Cover of Showcase #9, art credited by DC's records to Ruben Moreira and Al Plastino, but may in fact be all Plastino per Robert Hughes. © DC Comics Inc.
Eventually, we tracked this one down. While it wasn't the first spanking Lois ever administered (search the Comics Spanking Data Base on "Lois Lane" to find the Lois/Susie spanking, which is not posted but apparently occurred before this one), it was the first Lois/Super-Tot attempted spanking (as far as we know). It also occurred in Lois' first appearance as the star of her own title, in Showcase #9 (July-August 1957). In those days, DC would sometimes give a character a sort of try-out in Showcase before taking the risk of starting a new title, most famously with the new (Earth-1) Flash, which is the point at which the Silver Age of comics began. Eventually (March-April 1958), Lois Lane #1 hit the stands, and the title featured its first spanking only two issues later(!) in Lois Lane #3, as we'll see next time.
