With Toonerville Folks, we go back almost to the dawn of the comic strip. It first appeared in 1908, and creator Fontaine Fox stayed with it until he retired in 1955. Toonerville Folks was one of those strips that had far more influence on the general culture than it did on other comics. We're not sure we could name a single comics artist who was influenced by Fox's style, but the strip seems to have been read by just about everyone during the years it was published.
We're going to see three examples, the dates of which are not known. Each features a different character,
which was the norm for this strip - it was an ensemble cast rather than a star and supporting characters.
Toonerville Folks date unknown. The killjoys in early American comics seem to have spent considerable time cautioning young women against bending over. Fortunately this one didn't listen to Grandma and now is about to receive a good stroke of the old lady's cane. Story and art by Fontaine Fox. Scan by Pygmalion. © McNaught Syndicate.
The first one is set in the minute before the actual spanking, which we never see. It features a topic
near and dear to our hearts, namely women bending over into a spanking position. (See our special
presentations
A Tribute to Bending Over and
Humorama Spanking Positions for a lot more bending if you're interested). It seems that young ladies of that era were cautioned
against bending over into an "unladylike" position (see also
Out Our Way #1
for such counseling and for one of several examples from that strip in which the the Willets boy was always waiting for his sister
to bend over so he could give her a good whack), and the young lady here forgot that terrible
advice (from our perspective 
) and is about to receive a good
stroke from Grandma's cane as punishment.
Toonerville Folks date unknown. Story and art by Fontaine Fox. Scan by Pygmalion. © McNaught Syndicate.
We've discussed Flapper Spanking with approval before on CSR (no link this time - we're too tired to look another one up, but you can always search on the Home Page) and that's what this next scene appears to be an example of. This young flapper shows too much leg and gets paddled by Papa when returning home for a visit (presumably from college).
The spanking, seen in close-up. Scan by Pygmalion. © McNaught Syndicate.
The spanking panel. The OTK positioning is kind of weird, but that's what you can expect when caricature is employed (although E. C. Segar did it well enough in Thimble Theatre with Popeye).
Toonerville Folks date unknown. Story and art by Fontaine Fox. Scan by Pygmalion. © McNaught Syndicate.
This young flapper returns home from college and declares herself a communist, which doesn't sit
too well with her father Ezra Fairchild. Now it's she who won't be sitting too well for awhile
. We knew that today's colleges and universities are
pretty terrible places if we judge them by their humanities curricula, but apparently bad ideas
have been dribbling out of them for a long time. We try not to be too political here, but
advocating communism really should be out of bounds considering its appalling track record.
Granted at the time this appeared its history was much shorter, but apparently Ezra wasn't
easily fooled, nor was he too happy about spending good money on educating his daughter only to
have her get indoctrinated into totalitarianism instead. Good for him!
Now how about some spankings for the teachers and administrators who espouse Marxism and spoon feed that garbage to vulnerable youth?
The spanking, seen in close-up. Scan by Pygmalion. © McNaught Syndicate. Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/06/2019.
The spanking in close-up. The OTK positioning is pretty strange and the long cane doesn't complement it at all well. It occurs to us now that perhaps Reamer Keller was influenced by Fox, for neither man's style allowed for eroticism in their spanking scenes (see Keller's Wrist Watch Spanking and compare it to these efforts of Fox).
We've put these three spankings together since we don't expect to find any more adult spankings in Toonerville Folks but that's by no means a safe bet given the strip's 47-year run. And there was a character in it called Little Woo-Woo Wortle who was renowned for never having been spanked, proving that spanking was on the minds of a lot of people back then! (Hat tip to Don Markstein's Toonopedia for that interesting bit of information). (Andre does have one child spanking from the strip - interested readers should refer to SPK Comics.)
Many thanks to Pygmalion, Esq. for sending these in. He has written a lot of his own spanking stories which are available at Amazon (link here).
