Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

The Humorama Spanking Cartoons!

#175 - Shrink Spank #1

Posted 08/15/2008

Another spanking cartoon, this one by Bill Wenzel, one of the prolific mainstays of men's humor magazines of the 1940's through the 1960's. The original date and magazine are unknown. Wenzel favored cute, full-figured women, and along with the other cartoonists of the era drew the occasional "spanker". Like most specimens of the genre, it doesn't stand up under close inspection ("A well-rounded education begins from the bottom up" indeed - it's not her education that's well-rounded here), but we can forgive a cartoon's shortcomings as long as it features a nice spanking. Besides, there's good reason to suppose this caption was not the original, since it appears to be set in a psychiatrist's office (the couch and the certificate on the wall). It was customary for Humorama's editor, Abe Goodman, to "recycle" old cartoons from the files using new captions.

02/25/2011 Update: we guessed right about the caption - there was an earlier version (we think it's fair to assume it came earlier) with the certificate plainly visible on the wall, with the caption "This will do you almost as much good as a half hour on the couch!" Here it is (below left), courtesy of Hugob00m, who posted it on the forum under the topic Humorama Spanking Cartoons.

Next, we have this high-quality scan (below center) we made from an original Humorama page printed sometime in the 60's. This must have been at least its second appearance since it has a variation on the "well-rounded education" caption, but at least the art is not truncated the way it was in both other versions. Here again we see how much difference a good-quality scan makes: the spankee's dress clings beautifully to the well-rounded target! Wenzel was a superior craftsman and almost as consistent as DeCarlo on a cartoon-to-cartoon basis.

12/09/2011 Update: We now have the original cartoon as it first appeared in the July 1959 issue of Jest. It so strongly resembles b00m's version that we believe they're one and the same, with Mike's version dating later from the mid-1960's.

From Hugob00m. (Click to double-size)

From Mike's collection. Posted by the Web-Ed on 02/25/2011 (Click to double-size)

From Jest (July 1959). From the collection of and posted by the Web-Ed on 12/09/2011. (Click to double-size)