From Captain Marvel Adventures #31 (January 1944). Published by Fawcett.
Here we see Captain Marvel spanking his evil anti-conscience while his good conscience jumps up and down approvingly. While spanking a little devil is sort of appropriate just now for the Halloween season, it's also a little weird, not least because the symbolism isn't at all clear. Exactly who or what is CM really spanking here? Two pages are reproduced below so you can try to figure it out for yourselves.
Once again, Otto Binder is the writer behind the spanking. Now, the writer of a number of these Marvel Family spankings is unknown, but Binder was sort of the head writer in the sense that he and C. C. Beck used to brainstorm together to come up with ideas for the stories, and since he could have scripted all of these spankings we're beginning to wonder if he was by any chance a spanko. We remember reading an Avengers novel about forty years ago in which someone (Goliath or Captain America) tries to give the miniature-sized Wasp (Janet) a good swat on her behind by flicking his finger, and we think Binder was the author. Of course, none of this proves he was a spanko. The fact is that when you have to crank out as many pages per day as Binder did, you might well end up writing a lot of spanking scenes just to fill up space! And that's not a bad thing from our point of view, provided the spankings are M/F.
