Western Life Romance #2 (March 1950). No cover artist since a photograph was used, namely as still of Gale Storm and Audie Murphy from the movie "The Kid from Texas". Published by Marvel (as "Classic Detective Stories, Inc"). From the collection of and posted by the Web-Ed on 02/10/2017 (click to double-size).
Only one month after Quality Comics published Heart Throbs #4 (which we saw last time) in February of 1950, an entirely different publisher, Marvel/Atlas/Timely came out with Western Life Romance #2, a comic that is of interest for several reasons, the most important being that it too contains a spanking scene - if it didn't, it wouldn't be here. But there are several other remarkable things about it, beginning with the fact the indicia lists "Classic Detective Stories Inc." as the publisher, even though this is a romance comic, not a detective story. What gives?
Well, Martin Goodman, Atlas' publisher (he published the Humorama digests also), always had not one but many separate publishing corporations - a fact a U.S. Senate Committee was to remark on not too long after this time - presumably for tax reasons. (If you have a graduated corporate income tax, it's going to make sense to divide your profits between several corporations to reduce your overall tax liability). Atlas was actually made up of something like twenty-five separate corporations, and we'd guess (we haven't been able to confirm) that "Classic Detective Stories Inc." was the name Goodman published some of his non-comic general interest magazines under. There is no doubt, however, that this is basically an Atlas product (Atlas and Timely are classified as "Marvel" in the Comics Spanking Data Base).
The cover blurb, "...I was a lady bandit!", like the one on the cover of Heart Throbs #4,
sounds very promising at first because we all know what the very best way is to punish a lady
bandit 
. Yet it was a different story, "I Met My Master!" (another
very promising title) that actually contained the spanking. It's only three pages long, and we'll
see it in its entirety. Long-time CSR readers should see if they notice anything familiar
about it.
© Marvel Characters Inc.
© Marvel Characters Inc.
© Marvel Characters Inc.
Pencils and inks by Joe Maneely. Web-Ed believes the writer is Stan Lee. © Marvel Characters Inc. Posted by the Web-Ed on 02/10/2017.
You really have to love his threat to spank her again if she acts up in the future! O.K., let's take another look at the spanking panel. Although our unnamed "top hand" shoots with his right hand, he apparently spanks with his left! No problem since the composition correctly has our spankee Amy with her head down and to his right, with her hips perhaps just a little too far back. We think a horse-watering trough might be too wide to sit comfortably on, but he manages. One nice touch is her dialogue: "Ow...Stop! I understand! Stop! Please!" It's always a good sign when the spankee starts to plead instead of making demands, and uses the word "please"!
The writer, as usual with comics of this era, was uncredited, but for reasons we'll make clear shortly we believe it was none other than Stan Lee. The artist has been identified as Joe Maneely, one of the most talented men ever to work at Marvel. Lee said Maneely could turn out seven pages in one day if he really had to (two would be about average), his speed resulting from the sureness of his ability with the brush: he could put in minimal guide lines rather than a complete pencil drawing and then just ink in the finished figures. The only other man we've ever heard of who could ink that fearlessly was Wally Wood.
Maneely was killed in a tragic accident in 1958 when he fell between two cars of a moving train. Had he lived, it's hard to imagine he wouldn't have been one of the key artists at the beginning of the Marvel Age along with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck.
We remarked that long-time CSR readers might experience a sense of déjà vu when reading this story just as we did ourselves when we discovered it last year. Why that is quickly becomes apparent when we re-examine "A Man for Amy" from My Own Romance #24 which was presented two years ago as part of Romantic Spanking Month 2015: it's the same story, although completely re-drawn and with some very minor changes! It was published two years later in 1952, so although we saw it first it is in fact the second of the two stories to see print.
Let's present some side-by-side examples to make comparison easier:
Western Life Romances #2 (1950)
My Own Romance #24 (1952). Amy's speech is shorter, probably because there wasn't room to make the word balloon any larger.
Western Life Romances #2 (1950)
My Own Romance #24 (1952). Again, Amy's speech is a little shorter, and "seconds" has been changed to "minutes" for some reason.
Western Life Romances #2 (1950). No changes here in the dialogue, but Maneely composed his panel quite differently.
My Own Romance #24 (1952).
Western Life Romances #2 (1950)
My Own Romance #24 (1952). Both artists do the OTK positioning about equally well, we'd say.
Western Life Romances #2 (1950). Maneely shows both characters and more details in the background.
My Own Romance #24 (1952).
Western Life Romances #2 (1950)
My Own Romance #24 (1952)
A caricature of Stan Lee by Joe Maneely. Maneely, who draws himself sobbing at the desk behind Lee, is apparently referring to Lee's habit of insisting on changes to finished art, sometimes to the point of the artist's despair. Maneely would not have been coloring his own work, but perhaps he didn't always like Lee's instructions to the colorists.
The two versions are almost identical, and since Stan Lee was Atlas's editor, we conclude that he must have had his earlier story redrawn. While it's impossible to prove this is Lee's script, we had concluded in 2015 that he had written "A Man for Amy" based on its style and length (it is unlikely Lee would have assigned a short three-page script to another writer when he could easily have knocked it off himself in very little time), and it is extremely unlikely any other writer's old scripts would still have been lying around the Atlas offices for two years. Indeed, we know that even Lee's own scripts, which were often little more than plot synopses in later years, were mostly discarded because very few have ever surfaced.
Why have an old script redrawn? Reprinted art would not have been used at this time, but as story ideas were obviously recycled anyway and three-pagers were rather uncommon Lee may simply have taken the easy way out during what was a tumultuous period at Atlas. The fabled bullpen of artists had either been recently disbanded or was about to be (the bullpen Lee used to refer to as in the "Marvel Bullpen Bulletins" no longer existed except figuratively by that time (1960's), and this was to be the last issue of Western Life Romances which may have been a factor. That the title was being cancelled after only two issues seems odd and is in our opinion another sign something was going on. There is a theory that Western Life Romances was continued as My Friend Irma #3, but this has never been confirmed.
Some final thoughts on the art: while the unknown penciller and inker of "A Man for Amy" were no slouches (nice job on the faces, especially Amy's), it is clear that Maneely is the superior artist, for he does everything well. Look at his backgrounds, for instance, and his greater attention to the details on the clothing. His untimely death was a tremendous loss to comics.
