© DC Comics INC.
As kinky as Wonder Woman's creator Charles Moulton was, there were some other people at DC who were stranger still. It's not that they were necessarily into bondage and spanking as Moulton obviously was, or that they lived with two women (a wife and a former student) as he did, it was the strange way they looked at ordinary things, which meant that when they finally got around to spanking, it would be depicted in really weird fashion.
For example, there was an almost fetishistic fascination in the various Superman books with the initials "LL" (Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, Lex's sister Lena Luthor, Lois Lane, her sister Lucy Lane, Lori Lemaris, etc.). The artist Dan Clowes picked up on this with his own 60's-style Lloyd Llewellyn strips in the 90's. Of course what we care about here is spanking, not alliteration, so let's take a look at this example from Lois Lane #14 (Jan. 1960) where Lois gets spanked by Superman. This is just what we always wanted to see back then, right?
Art by Kurt Schaffenberger. © DC Comics INC.
Except that it's not actually Superman himself who does the honors, it's one of his robots. Now Lois believes this is some kind of mechanical failure, but in fact Superman is secretly guiding the robot (see 2nd panel). Pause for a moment to consider how very strange this is - not Superman wanting to spank Lois, which is normal enough and in fact long overdue - but to send a robot to do the job for him? To us, it makes him seem a jaded voyeur (think Story of O here for a minute) who can't even summon up enough interest in life to take the trouble to spank his own girl friend. If we were Superman and knew how to build a robot, we'd have it straighten up our Fortress of Solitude and take out the trash, but we'd reserve the pleasure of spanking Lois to ourselves - the virtue of self-reliance, don't you know.
- Lois Lane editor Mort Weisinger quite wrongly believed that spanking a woman was like "hitting" her (yet he had no problem with children being spanked), so he did not want to have Superman himself spanking Lois, despite numerous reader requests even after this robot-spanking episode.
- Even if Weisinger had been more enlightened regarding adult spanking, the Comics Code Authority might have nixed a true Superman/Lois scene. Our careful documentation of known comic-book spankings revealed that the Code allowed only one non-robot, non-parental M/F spanking between 1956 and 1965, an astonishing and deplorable record.
Finally, we note that Superman was permitted to deliver four spankings to deserving women in the newspaper strip version of the comic, which was not subject to the Code and which Weisinger did not edit. These may be located by browsing Comics Gallery 2 or by querying the Comics Spanking Data Base.
