Chicago Spanking Review

The Story of Martha Wayne

---> Comics Gallery 2

An original promotional booklet for the new (in 1953) comic strip The Story of Martha Wayne. Scan by Heritage Auctions. © Newspaper Enterprise Association Services Inc.

First, "Martha Wayne" was the name of Bruce Wayne's mother - wasn't anyone at NEA familiar with Batman? Dedicated comics readers could easily have wondered if the two Martha Waynes were the same person.

Second, about the abbreviation "NEA" (for Newspaper Enterprise Association Services Inc.) - didn't this syndicate worry about being confused with the National Education Association, which had been around since 1857? Making we're making too much of that possibility. Anyway, NEA is still around today as part of United Press International, but as far as we can tell the copyright on Martha Wayne has lapsed. (You can read the entire first issue at Comic Book + if you really want to).

The Story of Martha Wayne #1 (April 1956). Pictured on the cover are Martha Wayne, her son Billy, and four characters we can't identify! Art by Wilson Scruggs. Published by Argo.

Then there's the title: assuming no one thinks the strip is about Batman's deceased mother, why not call it simply Martha Wayne? Maybe someone had been watching The Strange Love of Martha Ivers or The World of Suzie Wong when he was trying to name The Story of Martha Wayne, but it makes the strip sound like the biography of a known figure from real life, which it wasn't.

Speaking of Martha, she looks like she'd have made a decent spankee, but in fact she and her son, the main characters in the strip, don't even appear in the spanking episode, and we can't tell our readers much about the ones who do. One thing we do know from the comic book at left: the strip was reprinted in comic book form beginning in 1956, but issue #1 is the only one believed to exist.

Of course 1956 is a pivotal moment in comics history (the dividing line between the Gold and Silver Ages, in the opinion of Web-Ed and some other scholars, as well as an unstable time for comics publishers and distributors. Argo was not exactly a major publisher, publishing only 19 known comics books, mostly newspaper strip reprints, and they did not survive the great shake-up of 1956-57. Yet they could not have planned to cancel the title after only one issue, for the sales figures from the first issue would not have been available by the time they needed to get a second issue to press. Was another issue prepared but not printed, or printed but never distributed? It's interesting to speculate, but in any case no reprint could have covered the spanking episode because it didn't appear until 1957.

(See Web-Ed's article The Effect of the Comics Code Authority on Comic-Book Spanking - Part 1 for some further details on what was happening to comics publishers and distributors at this time).

Let's meet our cast of characters: Our spanker, Peter Osprey, Jill Waring, his semi-romantic interest, and Tracy Keane, spankee-to-be! Peter and Tracy are starring in some sort of play, and Tracy has lied to Jill's mother about being married to Peter. Art by Wilson Scruggs; scans by Sweetspot.

The Story of Martha Wayne, August 25, 1957. Published by NEA Services Inc.

September 1, 1957: Peter announces to the audience that he and Tracy were never married, and when the curtain falls, she slaps him. He's had enough, and it's spankin' time! Note the resemblance to the spanking scene in the movie version of Kiss Me Kate in which Fred spanks Lilli as the curtain falls.

An alternate version of the strip from September 1, 1957.

September 8, 1957: It's one week later, and Jill tells her father about Peter spanking Tracy. No sign of Martha or Billy Wayne, though.

The spanking panel. Poor composition from Scruggs, who was a capable enough artist. After good formal training at the Pratt Institute he had worked as a magazine illustrator, and Martha Wayne was the first comic strip he ever did. Even so, it's hard to see why he would put two minor and unimportant characters in the panel's foreground, taking up almost half his available space, while relegating the spanker/spankee to the background and at most 25% of the panel's space. Anyone with any sense of dramatic action should understand that a spanking is always going to be the most interesting and dynamic thing in any panel in which one appears.

Here is a cropped version of the spanking panel which is actually what Scruggs should have drawn (of course at larger size).

Further cropping of the spanking panel reveals fairly good OTK positioning.

Finally, we cropped the panel even further to feature only Tracy's stinging buttocks! Scruggs actually delineates the target area fairly well (considering how badly he undersized this part of the panel) with a nice, sharp, well-positioned stinging effect over it.

Posted by the Web-Ed on 09/28/2018.