Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

The Humorama Spanking Cartoons!

#174 - Secretary Spanking #2

Here's another one from Dan DeCarlo, who has had several other of his cartoons featured in this gallery. The spankee protests that she's not the spanker's secretary, which seems pretty unlikely given the office setting and business attire, but as we mentioned in the preceding entry, it was customary for editors to occasionally "recycle" old cartoons from their files using new captions. We know we saw this one years ago with a caption that read something like "I am the chairman of the board and I will not tolerate typographical errors from my secretary!". This cartoon of course appeared many years before the excellent movie Secretary (2002).

Posted 08/25/2008

01/28/2010 update:

Here is the version we mentioned above. The caption reads, "I am the chairman of the board, Miss Shapely, and I will not tolerate clerical errors from my secretary!" As you can see, we remembered the caption pretty well, if we say so ourselves.

And just for the sake of completeness, here is a different scan of the first version.

And finally, here is an animated version. The kicking legs are kind of cute. We recently (May 2012) found out that it was an early effort of our own Hugob00m (see his Resident Gallery here).

From the collection of and posted by the Web-Ed on 05/18/2012 (click to double-size).

05/18/2012 Update: We have finally located the first version of this cartoon to see print, on the splash page of the May 1958 issue of Jest - and with a third caption! No real surprise there since we believe most Humorama "spankers" appeared three times, although we've been able to document the details for all three appearances of only a handful of cartoons. The original caption reads "I told you we must be firm with our collections; this will teach you not to allow anyone to run into arrears!" Arrears indeed - the only rear we're focused on here belongs to the spankee!

We've discussed the question of who did the Humorama captions before, but let's return to it now. All the Humorama original art we've seen has a suggested caption hand-printed by the cartoonist at the bottom. We know these were sometimes used by Humorama editor Abe Goodman as-is, while at other times he would make changes with blue pencil. There is a reliable report that at some point, DeCarlo complained to Goodman that it was taking too long to come up with the captions considering that he was only being paid $15.00 per cartoon, and that Goodman told him not to worry about it - just to do the art and let him (Goodman) come up with the caption. There is clear linguistic evidence that Goodman did the caption here, but without the original art we can't be sure what DeCarlo's contribution was.

We're still inclined to think that the better, wittier gags were DeCarlo's own work, perhaps with some help from Rudy Lapick, who frequently inked DeCarlo's pencils at Atlas (Marvel) and who is known to have helped him with some of his Humorama gags. We say that because if it were all Goodman's work, we would expect the gags from the other members of the "Big Five" (Ward, Wenzel, Stiles, and Homer) to be Goodman's also, and we know they're not. Still, exactly who wrote what will probably only ever be known in cases where we have the original art. We may revisit this subject in a later article.

From the collection of Steve W. Posted by the Web-Ed on 03/29/2012 (click to double-size).

03/29/2012 Update: Steve W. located the third version of this cartoon, and in a most surprising place: the June 1972 issue of Wink. Now the reason we found this surprising is that we knew Wink as one of Robert E. Harrison's girlie mags back in the 1940's (which contained some F/F spankings, by the way, a few of which we'll see in a future article). Apparently Humorama decided to resuscitate the title, which had never belonged to them in the past, as a digest. But 1972 was about the end of the line for the digests, and this new Wink couldn't have lasted long as Humorama chugged along for its last ten years publishing only a few full-sized magazines.

Although the caption is one we've seen before, the typography is different, raising the possibility that this cartoon may have appeared for a fourth time (twice with "wrong office", once with "chairman of the board", and once with "accounts in arrears"). We'll keep you posted if we find out more.