posted by the Web-Ed on 05/07/2010

We're coming to the end of our Bill Wenzel cartoons, so bear with us because we have a lot to say about Wenzel this time. First, let's dispose of the gag if we can, which is just a little obscure. It seems to be original and not later rewritten by the editor, as sometimes happened when these old humor cartoons got "recycled". So, why do we rehearse this scene when the sound-effects man is absent? Either so that multiple re-takes will be necessary, or (more likely) because without the sound-effects man to enhance the smacking sounds, we'll just have to spank harder! Seems reasonable to us.

As noted in "Secretary Spanked by Senior", we had originally failed to identify that work as Wenzel's until DRD drew our attention to it in the forums. Our problem was that we had few examples of Wenzel's work and the signatures did not match, leading us to believe we were dealing with the art of two separate cartoonists. We should have examined the material more closely, and we're going to make up for not having done that now. We will look at this cartoon and the two other "spankers" already posted, plus one non-spanker we dug up for comparison purposes.

Sound Effects

Bottoms Up

Spanked by Senior

Just in case anyone is still not convinced, here's a non-spanking example that again demonstrates Wenzel's characteristic round face.

And just for fun, here's the complete cartoon. As we mentioned, Wenzel draws with curves almost exclusively, producing women who are very, er, round in certain places. One of those places is the key to the gag here, where the male student tries to convince his professor that even though he looked over the girl's shoulder, he really "didn't see a thing on her paper!" His vision was blocked, you see, by her - well, you get the idea. We like the expression on the professor's face, which seems to say, "A likely story, young man." The fashions would seem to place this cartoon around 1950. The green accent color is reminiscent of the way the old Humorama digest covers looked, and indicate this image was scanned from "The Pin-Up Art of Bill Wenzel", which we think is still available from Fantagraphics Books and which we recommend to anyone interested in Wenzel's art. If we weren't so broke, we'd have ordered a copy ourselved before we began to research this.

Wenzel's women tend to be a trifle overweight, but they carry their poundage extremely well and are rather more realistically proportioned than the slender beauties of Homer and (sometimes) Kirk Stiles. Also, the nice round bottoms that Wenzel provided are eminently spankable, so it's a pity he didn't draw more "spankers".

And the "bottoms up" signature, the one that doesn't match? It's printed in a stylized way, which at first would make it seem not to be a true signature at all, but after doing some more research on Wenzel (a fun project, by the way), we're convinced it is Wenzel's. There are several other cartoons of his that he signed the same way. Why did he do it? The only explanation that comes to mind is that his usual signature was so hard to read that if he wanted to be sure an editor knew who he was, he used this alternate version. Perhaps when presenting his portfolio to a new editor, he made sure to include a cartoon that had this alternate signature.