Chicago Spanking Review

Return of The Spanker

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Cover of Sensational She-Hulk #17 (July 1990). Art by Dale Keown. © Marvel Characters Inc. (Web-Ed's collection; click to double-size)

One of the reasons we started CSR back in 2004 was that we had in our possession some unusual and/or unknown comic book spankings and we wanted to bring them to the attention of the spanko world. One remarkable example came from the Howard the Duck Treasury Edition and featured a character called The Spanker spanking Howard's girl friend Beverly. Because of this sort of esoteric knowledge, when we recently presented the old HTD villain Dr. Bong watching his maid Fifi spanking the She-Hulk, that bell on Bong's head wasn't the only one that started ringing. Something had apparently happened with these characters years before, so we decided to look into it and what we found along the way was Sensational She-Hulk #17 (July 1990).

As we mentioned in Fifi/She-Hulk, the latter character was never one of our favorites, so even with Steve Gerber returning to Marvel (which we hated to see because we knew his talents would be wasted there given the company's editorial direction) and writing Sensational She-Hulk, we never followed the title. And that's how we came to miss two spankings in it, the second of which we'll see now. (The first is buried in the M/M section of this gallery - hunt it up if you must.) It's by no means a great scene, but it is M/F and there is something special about our spankee-to-be, referred to throughout this story as "Mrs. Mason," a clue to her identity so obscure even we missed it at first and which we'll explain after we check out the scene.

The details of the plot need not concern us - the super-hero genre was not a natural fit for Gerber and he tended to write such comics with broad-ranging, over-elaborate "cosmic" plots, sort of like a latter-day Gardner Fox but taking it all less seriously. That is how he came to create the team of super-villains that included The Spanker back in the HTD Treasury Edition who return here to threaten the cosmos again. All we need to know is that in this scene they're attacking our heroes, who include Howard, She-Hulk, and Mrs. Mason. While Tille the Hun tackles She-Hulk, The Spanker sets his sights on Mrs. Mason and begins to paddle her thoroughly!

Now, Mrs. Mason has been badgering Howard, whom she dislikes, all during the previous episode (in issue #16), so at first he lets The Spanker warm her seat with his paddles (he uses two now, sort of a spanking version of The Two-Gun Kid). Eventually, Howard comes to her aid by shoving his cigar in Spanker's mouth, giving her the chance to punch him out.

"She probably deserves a good whacking." Indeed she does, Howard, and you should have let it go on a while longer.

The spanking panel - The Spanker spanks again!

The spanking panel, as is too often the case, is not well composed: it's too crowded (the emphasis should be on just two characters, spanker and spankee, and there's a whole knock-down, drag-out brawl between She-Hulk and Tillie going on in the background while Howard is standing in front of the action), the positioning is possibly the most bizarre we've ever seen (spanker sitting on spankee's lower legs with her rear end pointing up at his face!), and the panel is too small given the importance of the action taking place. The only good things are the stinging effect drawn where the paddles are applied and Mrs. Mason's "Oww!" confirming that the sting is being felt.

The Spanker has a new costume, obviously a parody of The Punisher's, and equally obviously the inspiration for that of The Paddler, who came along two years later.

Now let's get back to the question of Mrs. Mason's identity, which might not mean much even after she just blurted it out, by comparing her face with the one in the two panels below we dug up in a comic book from 1948.

Yes, it's our spankee Louise Mason years earlier when she was still Louise Grant, alias The Blonde Phantom! (Mark Mason, her future husband, was the detective she worked for at the time - this was the obscure clue we mentioned earlier, but she became a regular in She-Hulk's book so the readers would have been at least somewhat familiar with who she was). While technically this means we have a genuine superheroine spanking, it's really more of a missed opportunity given the character's age and the crazy position she was spanked in. Why couldn't Louise have been spanked OTK back in the Golden Age, and in her old, sexy costume?

Art by Al Bellman.

All Winners Comics (Vol. 2) #1 (August 1948), artists unknown (click to enlarge). © Marvel Characters Inc. Scans from Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine. Posted by the Web-Ed on 09/04/2020.

Let's see the cover of that issue, All Winners Comics #1 (Volume 2, August 1948). As we have recounted elsewhere (see e.g. Sea Beauty Spanked), in the early post-war period Marvel (then known as Timely) tried out a number of female characters, mostly versions of popular male heroes in an attempt to woo female readers (and perhaps some of the older male ones as well .) But apart from most of the girls being pale imitations of the males, Marvel's timing was off as interest in super-heroes was waning fast. The three male heroes seen on the cover here were Timely's biggest guns, the Sub-Mariner, The Human Torch (the original one, not Johnny Storm), and Captain America, and not one would last beyond 1949 (Cap's title technically lasted until February 1950, but it was a horror comic by then) although an unsuccessful attempt would be made to revive them during the 50s. As for All Winners Comics, it caught the next stagecoach and went west, becoming All Western Winners with the very next issue.

Unlike Namora, The Blonde Phantom was not based on any male hero we can think of but seems to have been an imitation of Phantom Lady and perhaps Lady Luck. In Marvel, Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics, Les Daniels credits Otto Binder as The Blonde Phantom's creator, although we imagine Stan Lee probably had something to do with it. Now, Binder scripted at least sixteen comic-book spankings, so we ask again: why, oh why, couldn't he have done one more with The Blonde Phantom?