Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

The Humorama Spanking Cartoons!

#229 - Dr. Swatt's Prescription

From Joker, November 1973. Art by Bill Wenzel (click to increase in size).

We will see now the last of the nine known Wenzel cartoons from Humorama's final decade (1972-81). It is very similar to the one we saw last time, Party Gown Spanking, which is not surprising as both appeared for the first time in the November 1973 issue of Joker, leading to the conclusion that Wenzel must have completed them contemporaneously. "Doctor Spanks Patient" was, of course, a fairly common theme among several cartoonists including Wenzel himself sixteen years earlier in 1957 with Spanked Hypochondriac and, if we include psychiatrists among the ranks of physicians, in Shrink Spank #1 and Shrink Spank #6.

A comparison of the two is interesting. The later cartoon has a looser line (not that Wenzel's lines were ever particularly tight), better OTK positioning, and a bare bottom (always a plus ), while the earlier one has a cleaner line and better finishing with the ink wash but an awkward OTK position and the spanker-doctor is using the wrong hand. It is fortunate indeed that of the Big Six Humorama cartoonists, three of them were able to give us later examples of spanking cartoons in which the spankee's bottom had been bared (Wenzel, still at Humorama, of course Bill Ward all over the place, and surprisingly, George Morrice), while we are left to wonder what the bare-bottomed spankees of Dan DeCarlo, Kirk Stiles, and Homer Provence might have looked like had these men ever had the opportunity and desire to draw them.

From Cartoon Fun and Comedy, April 1980. Art by Bill Wenzel (click to increase in size). Posted by the Web-Ed on 10/08/2021.

This cartoon was reprinted seven years later in the April, 1980 issue of Cartoon Fun and Comedy. Not coincidentally, that was where "Party Gown Spanking" was reprinted also. Our study of the "spankers" revealed the interesting and lamentable fact that in its last years (we don't have the exact dates nailed down), Humorama had taken to reprinting not just individual cartoons but whole pages from earlier magazines, and this is what happened with the Nov. 1973 Joker and the April 1980 Cartoon Fun and Comedy. (We actually realized this during one of the few occasions we owned both magazines at the same time; for the most part we were always forced to sell our Humorama mags shortly after we purchased and searched them.) Sometimes one or two cartoons on a page were substitutions and often the model photographs were too (probably for legal reasons), but Humorama must have saved some money by not having to set up completely new pages for printing. That and the abandonment of new material tells us that Humorama's finances must have been in decline for several years before it ceased publishing altogether in 1981.