Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

The Humorama Spanking Cartoons!

#124 - Wrist Watch Spanking

From Stare (Sept. 1976). Scanned and posted by the Web-Ed on 01/25/2013 (click to double-size).

We've remarked before on the difficulty in coming up with spanking-themed gags for these cartoons, and this is the only one we know of it which the ostensible reason for the spanking is to wind the spanker's wristwatch! Quite possibly the spankee here is being ironic when she observes, "What a wonderful way to wind your self-winding wristwatch!" Certainly she doesn't looks as pleased as the spanker does.

Despite using a sketchy style, the artist manages to give some prominence to the spankee's buttocks, which always helps, and the OTK positioning is quite good. The cartoon is unsigned (or had the signature truncated to print it in such a small part of the page), but we believe it to be the work of the prolific Reamer Keller, who did many for both Humorama and other magazines going back at least to the 1940's. Keller had a couple of signatures, neither of which resemble the mark we see at the bottom center, but the stylistic similarities between this cartoon and the one below, which is known to be by Keller, are apparent. Note in particular the sketchy way the rectangular shapes are drawn, freehand, and always starting and finishing at the upper left-hand corner. If this guy isn't Keller, he was sure influenced by him.

The date of this cartoon's first appearance is unknown. The version we see here is another CSR exclusive and was taken from the September 1976 issue of Stare, which at that time was a full-sized magazine rather than digest-sized (its original format - we don't know whether there was a break during which Stare wasn't published at all). The format is significant because the digests generally allotted each cartoon a full page, whereas this one was printed at 1/8 page size, possibly causing the signature to be truncated as we mentioned above.

Known work of Reamer Keller (click to double-size).

Here's a cartoon which bears one of Keller's known signatures. We can see the overall "sketchy" style of line drawing he preferred as well as his habit of drawing rectangular shapes free-form, beginning and ending at the top left-hand corner. Keller did no other known "spankers" for Humorama, but we do have one he did apparently for another publisher that depicts a post-spanking scene with a mother having just given the hairbrush to her grown daughter. We'll see that one after the Humorama Series is concluded.

Cover of the September, 1976 issue of Stare (click to double-size).

Here is the issue's cover. As mentioned above, Stare was a full-sized magazine at this time, and appropriately enough had an article on "The English Vice" which we should see eventually, although not as a part of this series.