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Unfortunately, the unknown artist created all kinds of problems for himself and the spanking panel leaves a lot to be
desired. First, although Jim is shown taking Belle over his knee from right to left in the preceding panel, all of
a sudden she's over from left to right! Second, the artist wanted to show a reasonably detailed view of Belle's face,
but there was no way to do that while squeezing in Jim and his horse as well. So he reduced Belle's size by
about 25% to fit her in to a 1/6 page sized panel, making her suddenly look tiny next to Jim even though she had been
nearly as tall as he only one panel before!
Finally, he takes Jim's foot out of the stirrup and bends his leg back at an almost impossible angle, putting Belle
over the horse instead of over Jim's lap! Why he did this is anyone's guess, but it may have been to lower Belle's
upper body to leave room for the word balloons. What was needed was either a much longer shot or, preferably, a much
larger panel. Of course, layout problems in the script-first method of comics production are at least as much the
writer's fault as the artist's. If we were scripting a spanking, you can bet we'd specify at least a half-page
for it!
The artist almost looks like
Bruno Premiani on a bad day. There is no record of Premiani, an Italian citizen by birth, working at Fox,
but he was in the U.S. at the time taking assignments at DC, the company with which he is most associated.
If it is Premiani, we can't explain why the draftsmanship isn't up to his usual standards, or why the horses (which Premiani
loved, even producing a whole book of equine illustrations) weren't better-drawn.
With several bad girls in each issue, we have to wonder if there might have been a second spanking somewhere
in the five issues of Women Outlaws we haven't been able to examine, especially the last two about which very
little is known. We'll keep looking.
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