This strip is called Susie Q., strongly suggesting it's Susie Q. Smith which ran in the 1940's and 50's, but we're not quite sure. In the first panel, Susie (we suppose that's who she is) confronts her father, who is about to take the hairbrush to a child who apparently is either Susie's much younger sister or daughter. "Father! You're not supposed to do that!" she exclaims, citing "important psychologists" as authorities.
Apparently her father is not too impressed by this appeal to authority, and in the last panel Susie herself gets taken over his knee and the hairbrush is soundly applied. This is actually a pretty funny gag, taken on its own, although the averted spanking of the young girl, which we're not thinking about by the time we see that last panel, is of course more troubling. (Since only a grown woman is actually shown being spanked, we decided this comic does meet our "no child spanking" policy). "The appeal to authority" as it is formally known is a logical fallacy, and all of us get tired of being told what to do by so-called experts at one time or another. Of course that doesn't change the fact that, as we think most spankos agree, spanking children is a bad idea.
© King Features Syndicate(?). Posted by the Web-Ed on 02/18/2011.
As we said above, this is almost certainly Susie Q. Smith. The only thing that makes us wonder is that medical authorities generally, including psychologists, were not questioned much until maybe the 60's when the strip would no longer have been running. But maybe it's that 50's attitude of accepting what the experts say as gospel, expressed here by Susie, that's being attacked, with Father representing the superior wisdom of an older generation. The low-resolution scan is hard to see clearly, but the signature could be "__ Walters" which would confirm the strip's identity.
