Art by Charles Nicholas. © Marvel Comics Inc. Posted by the Web-Ed on 01/21/2010
As we continue with "The Weirdest Comic-Book Spankings of All Time", we turn to some non-robot examples, beginning with this gem taken from the long-forgotten Rockman USA (Underground Secret Agent), in USA Comics #3 (1942). Rockman is a secret agent who takes "going underground" literally - he operates below ground level! This is a very strange idea: first, there's nothing much worth spying on down there, except maybe for some German "moles" (ouch!); second, if anyone sees you hundreds of feet underground where no sane person has any business being, and wearing a leotard to boot, it's pretty obvious that you're engaged in some kind of suspicious activity. Rockman may have been underground, but it's hard to see how he could have remained undercover for very long.
Our story also features that old standby, the female in danger: four sinister little "pixies" are preparing to
violate the Mann Act by carrying a blonde across (or at least under) state lines for immoral purposes. If she ever gets
home safely, she ought to fire her clothing designer, who for some reason placed two gold cups on the front of her dress
in a location guaranteed to drive any midgets who saw them wild, causing them to carry her off in a frenzy. But never fear -
it's Rockhead Rockman to the rescue!
From USA Comics #3 (1942)
Something Stan Lee may have forgotten while he was banging out this script in the middle of the night is that these "pixies" were not bad boys but grown men. Yes, this story was written by the one and only Stan (The Man) Lee, who has probably scripted more comic pages than anyone else in history. This is his only spanking scene as far as we know, although it's always possible that there's another buried somewhere in the hundreds of pages of Romance comics he wrote. The spanking of male midgets, sometimes recast as dwarves or even "pixies" as here, was a motif that occurred with alarming frequency during the Golden Age of comics, and Lee could have picked it up from something he read over at, say, Fawcett. It was not likely to have been the idea of the artist, Charles Nicholas, since this was before Lee pioneered the "Marvel Style" of pencilled art before finished script along with artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in the 1960's. And the thing about male/male (M/M) adult spanking is that there's something unmistakably gay about it, which is a subject we'll comment on further in forthcoming entries of this series. For right now, we'll simply point out that it makes Rockman look more than a little weird, especially when you throw in the costumes and setting.
Now back to our story. Rockman's approach to problem-solving is not exactly cerebral, for his method here consists of slapping the pixie-men upside the head ("Four at a time, ha-ha!") and then turning them over his knee! Rockman old buddy, a friendly word to the wise: if you're going to spend your time spanking male midgets when there's a beautiful blonde girl within easy reach, tongues will wag and people are likely to conclude that a) you've got rocks in your head; b) you've been underground too long; and c) your leotard is too tight.
