[Note: a revised, extended, and (I hope) improved version of this article with additional pictures has been posted on the main site - Web-Ed]
Basically, there was an undercurrent of darkness pervading DC’s superhero books, increasing throughout the BA, that militated against anything as seemingly pedestrian as spanking. At its mildest, this took the form of “social relevance” – well-intentioned Left-Liberal flapdoodle like the Green Lantern/Green Arrow of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams,
For those unfamiliar with these GL/GA stories (probably most of my readers today), I’m thinking of all that wailing in one issue about our “plastic” society, which was puerile as social criticism and anyway ground The Graduate had already covered years earlier, or that old black guy complaining to GL in another, “I hear you work for the blue skins, and on some planet you saved the orange skins, and you done considerable for the purple skins, but you never did squat for the black skins” which causes me to burst out laughing whenever I think of it. O’Neil’s heart was in the right place, but what exactly was it that he (and the old black guy) thought that a long-underwear hero like GL should do? Join a protest march? Overthrow the government? Presumably black people benefited as much as whites when GL extinguished a blazing fire, or put a criminal behind bars, or did whatever could be done through means of brute force - the only tool available to a superhero, when you come to think of it.
- Green Arrow wastes his time and ours by moaning about plastic Christmas trees, instead of kicking ass like a superhero should! Copyright DC Comics Inc.
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At its most extreme – Crisis on Infinite Earths, Dark Knight, and Watchmen (which could be considered BA as it was conceived of in 1985) – this darkness was less an undercurrent than a raison d’etre. Although far more ambitious than anything Marvel was doing and commercially very successful, I wouldn’t call any of these series an artistic success, but I would say the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons Watchmen was probably the most interesting and worthy failure the comics medium had ever produced, at least up to that time and probably to the present day. With the deaths of Supergirl, Flash, and others, Crisis revisited and indeed amplified DC’s disturbing SA tendency toward a kind of morbid sadism (think of all the deaths that occurred in their “imaginary stories” – even Superman himself in 1961). Frank Miller's Dark Knight lived up (or down) to its name, and obliterated every last trace of Romantic heroism in Batman. It’s not that Batman could or should be played as Little Mary Sunshine, but alongside the grim crusader’s need to avenge the murder of his parents there had to be a noble purpose – making the world a little better – to give his stories, and his life, meaning. Batman had this in the 60’s and even in the grittier 70’s, which is why the 1966 Batman could spank a reckless playgirl while the Dark Knight never could.
Again, it’s not that you couldn’t have fit any spankings into the plots of these series, although of course it would have been wildly out of place to insert one, say, into the middle of Rorschach’s investigation into the murder of the Comedian, it’s that the nihilistic mood of pervasive darkness at DC left no room for the playful humor that characterized the Marvel spankings of this period. If a spanking had appeared one would have expected to see it used to symbolize the decadence of American society. In fact, Moore had almost done just that in his earlier V for Vendetta, where an onstage cabaret caning (we don’t quite get to see it) represents the perversion of erotic love, and is intended to symbolize the degradation of once-decent British society into totalitarianism.
These tendencies continued during the Modern Age, for example with The Death of Superman (2nd), which is why we don’t have any M/F spankings from DC’s books during this period either. It’s also what drove me away from DC, incidentally, but that’s only important here inasmuch as it was one of the things that led to my giving up on comics altogether, which unfortunately means I don’t know much about most of this period.
[I’ve expressed some further thoughts about what went wrong artistically with DC in my essay “Wonder Woman: Still Spankin’ After All These Years” for those who may be interested.]