Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

Rivals of Humorama

#5 - Fresh Fish Spanking

The Wolf Book Mascots, Nick, Zippy, Packy, and Tessie.

Art by Alfred Rosenberg. From an unknown issue of NIFTY. Posted by the Web-Ed on 04/01/2016 (click to double-size).

We come now to the third entry of our mini-series on the Wolf Books and the second featuring Nifty. We don't know the year of this issue which is unfortunate since this cartoon strongly resembles Keziah's Fresh Fish Spanking from 1954, and we'd dearly like to know which came first. The gag is the same - a "fresh" fish whacks a female shopper on her behind as she passes by. We think Keziah's is the better of the two, although Alfred Rosenberg puts an appealing sort of goofy grin on the fish's face. Keziah draws the female figure better and gives his spankee a wonderfully startled look as she receives the whack.

Rosenberg is an unfamiliar artist to us; we don't recall ever seeing him in the Humorama digests, and as far as we know, he didn't do much for the Wolf Books either. If he came up with the gag before Keziah, we have to wonder why the Wolf Books didn't then rapidly develop a line of spanking cartoons afterward as happened at Humorama, where the first OTK spanking cartoon appeared only about six months after Keziah's cartoon. (Another question is why Keziah never did any more spanking cartoons at Humorama since they were about to come into vogue there).

Once again Nifty Nick, the magazine's mascot, is absent, but that's not really a surprise as he only appeared in about 20% of the cartoons.

Art unsigned but obviously by Kirk Stiles. From the Sept. 1955 issue of NIFTY (click to double-size).

We'd like to give CSR readers some idea of the "feel" of the Wolf Books. We would say that where Humorama was a little risqué, it was also tasteful in that it generally avoided vulgarity. The cartoon women are sexy, yes, and occasionally get spanked for very minor misbehavior such as bad spelling, but they're not generally abused or positioned in a way that crosses a certain line. The Wolf Books on the other hand were not always so restrained as we can see with this Kirk Stiles cartoon from the September 1955 issue of Nifty.

Stiles, whose Humorama work we admire (with reservations), really pushes past the boundaries of good taste here with the implication that the secretary is going to be raped after the burglar is done robbing the safe. Perhaps even worse is the man's expression - he seems to be regarding the idea of the future assault with pleasure. No decent person seeing this could find it the least amusing. Did Stiles have a nasty streak we never got to see in his Humorama work because the editor, Abe Goodman, wouldn't allow it, or did the unknown editor of the Wolf Books encourage this sort of thing? We will see in a later entry in this series that Tessie, Wham!'s mascot, was occasionally positioned rather rudely, suggesting the latter explanation is the correct one.