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We kick off our next series of superhero spankings with an example featuring the numero uno practitioner of same - Wonder Woman! In this excerpt from Wonder Woman #2 (Fall 1942), she administers a strict cure for one girl's foolishness. Of course, that's WW's cure for every problem (to be honest, it's ours too - at least, we figure it's always worth a try). Nor has the bondage element been forgotten, although no one in this panel is tied up (read the caption: "Wonder Woman, freed of her bonds, ..."). Why all the B & D in Wonder Woman's comics, you ask? Well, Charles Moulton, WW's creator, was a great believer in the value of submission to loving (female) authority - witness Naha's response here to being spanked: "Ow! Ow! I'm cured - I'll obey you!" In fact Moulton, whose real name was William Marston, apparently thought that society would be greatly improved by the submission of the strong to some kind of feminine ideal.
Now, there's a whole lot wrong with that idea, beginning with the necessary loss of individualism and political freedom it would entail, but for the moment we'll spare you an elaborate moral and psychological critique of Moulton's theories and confine ourselves to lamenting one immediate consequence of them: the lack of spankings being given by men in his work. Wonder Woman gets spanked, all right, but almost always by other women. (In the previous entry, also from Wonder Woman #2, WW gets a few swats from one of Mars's soldiers.) Thus we never get to see Steve Trevor, WW's sometime boyfriend, haul her over his knee to demonstate that, Amazonian powers or not, he was the one wearing the pants in their relationship. Therefore, if we want to see Wonder Woman getting spanked by a man (and we do, we do!) we must rely on other artists to draw this type of scene for us.
