Chicago Spanking Review

Susie Q. Loses Her Appeal to Authority

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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 Susie's younger brother. "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, ignoring the averted spanking of the boy which we're not thinking about by the time we see that last panel. (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, but we think most spankos would agree that spanking children is a bad idea.

© McNaught 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.

01/13/2017 Update: We now have new scans which allow us to verify our previous conclusions and get a clearer look at the strip. First, we were right about the identity and the creators: it is Susie Q. Smith and it is by The Walters. Second, the date has been identified as April 4, 1957. And perhaps most importantly, our spankee is indeed the title character, which is of some interest as female lead characters were not often spanked in their own strips. It did happen, for example Brenda Starr Spanking #2, but it was much more common to find M/F spankings in strips with a male lead (Phantom, Smilin' Jack, etc. - we obviously could go on a long time) where the female character had it coming to her. Think of all those spank-worthy jungle girls who were never turned OTK - it's a crime!

So why Susie Q. Smith? The obvious answer is that in it, spankings were used for humorous effect, as we will see with several additional examples in the coming weeks. In adventure strips such as Sheena and the other jungle girls, or Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, it may have seemed that getting spanked would lessen the heroine's heroic stature (although Scarlet did once get butted by a billy-goat).

Let's see the new scans now. Sweetspot provided the first one to us while we recently found that Andre had located a second. The two are quite similar although they certainly came from two different newspapers.

From Sweetspot. © McNaught Syndicate. (Click to increase in size).

From Andre. © McNaught Syndicate. (Click to increase in size). Posted by the Web-Ed on 01/13/2017.