Marvel Family Spankings

[Dan N.]

Hiya Web-Ed... Thanks for your excellent research, in coming up with the comic strip where Captain Marvel spanks a blonde "wild-cat," as he calls her. This is the first, and ONLY, panel I have ever seen of CM spanking a female. I know that you mentioned another one, where some mean old man spanks his daughter (or niece, or granddaughter), only to have Mary Marvel swoop in and spank the mean old man! When I first saw those panels, I immediately rejected them. Not only because I am dead set AGAINST females spanking males, but I also object to cruelty, even in M/F panels. Oh, I think the CM artist was really disgusting, that day.

But then the CM artist was always disgusting. I've seen probably a dozen panels over the years, showing Capt. Marvel spanking some bad guy, or even just a jerk, and it reinforces my feeling that the original artist for CM was a pervert. You yourself, Web-Ed, have written (someplace -- I can't find it now) that M/M just seems gay.

So, it's fun to see this new Capt. Marvel M/F scene, which was apparently first printed in 1945. In retrospect, I am glad that the creators of CM lost their case in court, when the makers of Superman sued for copyright infringement.

Do I sound bitter? Maybe I am, a little bit. A superhero I once followed regularly, turns out to be a pervert. Thank goodness he is gone!

Cheers,
Dan

[web-ed]

Dan - hope you don't mind, but I thought your post was important enough to justify its own topic, so I moved it here and changed its name.

Glad you liked Captain Marvel Spanks Wildcat. There is one other M/F CM spanking that I know of and have posted - Captain Marvel Spanks Minerva. Minerva isn't young, but she is female.

The Marvel Family has turned out to be quite problematic for me. The vast majority of the spankings involving both CM and CM Jr. have been M/M, while with Mary Marvel I have now discovered four F/M spankings (I've posted two of these) in addition to one that was already generally known before I began my Golden Age search. (By the way, the panel with the mean man spanking his step-daughter was one I refused to post, although I did document it in the Data Base). I really didn't expect the search to come out like this, nor am I sure what to do. I don't see how I can avoid posting the Mary Marvel ones, but it's all the M/M stuff I really dislike. Some of these I'll put in another "Weird Spankings" series, and the rest - ? Maybe I'll just document them without posting.

Yes, I wrote in the original "Weird Spankings" in Comics Gallery 1 ("The Creeper Spanks a Street Punk" - sorry, but I can't put a third link in this post because the board won't allow it) that M/M always seemed a little gay to me. This kind of material was always under-the-table even by adult bookstore standards, and I never encountered it in the 80's when looking for M/F spanking stuff. Maybe that's why it gives me that queasy feeling to this day - I don't know. I hope nobody thinks we're "homophobic" because of the way we feel about M/M, and for that matter, I know that there is such a thing as non-gay M/M spanking (but it must be rare). Anyway, I never expected to have to deal with so much of it.

Who the writers and artists were is not known in all cases - there were too many Marvel Family stories being cranked out by more than one shop. I have noted this information when I could be reasonably sure of it. I suspect many of the CM ones were written by Otto Binder. Was he a pervert? That's something everyone will have to judge for himself. The case can be made that some of these M/M episodes were intended to be ludicrous, which was part of my rationale for including them in the first "Weird Spankings" series. The one example I found with Plastic Man (not yet posted) certainly falls into this category. But the sheer number of them involving CM or CM Jr. is a little disturbing (I just this evening found another two with CM Jr. spanking the Nazis - again!).

F/M stuff is less disturbing, although it always seems backwards to me. I try to see it as humorous role-reversal, and I remind myself that I have some obligations to readers who want to see this type of material. I have mentioned in the old letters page (before this board was installed) that it is less natural than M/F and that it poses practical problems in a relationship, in response to which I have received several angry notes. Once of these days I'll go into more detail on the subject; in the mean time I think I'm going to post all my accumulated F/M material in one week to get it over with quickly rather than dragging it out over a period of weeks. It will all carry warning notices ("F/M") as you once suggested so that people can avoid it if they wish. In addition to the Mary Marvel stuff, I have eight drawings supplied to me by Franco, one by Bill Ward (who did many), and most surprisingly, one by Kirk Stiles!

[daneldorado]

Web-Ed wrote:


F/M stuff is less disturbing, although it always seems backwards to me. I try to see it as humorous role-reversal.... I have mentioned in the old letters page (before this board was installed) that it is less natural than M/F and that it poses practical problems in a relationship, in response to which I have received several angry notes.


"Less natural than M/F" is exactly RIGHT!!

If God did not intend for women to get spanked, then tell me... WHY did He give them such nice, large, round, inviting TARGETS?

The question answers itself, I think. M/F is the way to go!

Cheers,
Dan

[web-ed]

All available issues of the various Marvel Family comic books have now been searched. A few spankings are still to be posted and put into the Comics Spanking Data Base (this will be completed before the end of the month), but the final numbers are in, and they're not good. Here they are, by orientation in descending order of desirability:

M/F - 4
F/F - 0
F/M - 7 (5 with Mary Marvel as spanker)
M/M - 27 [!]

Interested readers can find them by searching the DB using "Fawcett" as publisher (using "Marvel" in personnel will give most but not all of them, because some have spankers who aren't part of the Marvel Family). 71% are M/M - there's something wrong with that.

Of course there are some rare items that exist only in private collections I don't have access to, so there may very well be a small number of remaining Marvel Family spankings; however, it's unlikely any of them are M/F. (Since the ratio is only about 1 in 7, we would probably have to find 7 more spankings to get just 1 M/F).

[Tanner]

I would not say that F/M is "wrong", but that to myself it is of little or no interest. Likewise M/M. You mentioned non-gay M/M as possible. Something like a M/M domestic discipline scene might be an example.. Certainly a scene of a father giving a disciplinary spanking to a teenage son would be no more disturbing than if it was a teenage daughter. OTOH, if one argues that all spankings have a sexual component, then both would be taboo.
Never much of a Captain Marvel fan anyhow.

[daneldorado]

As we've noted before, The Adventures of Captain Marvel almost NEVER had a scene of a man spanking a naughty female, although there are plenty of pics of Capt. Marvel spanking some GUY.

This leads me to believe that C.C. Beck and Otto Binder, the creators and writers of Captain Marvel during that character's Golden Years (1941-1953), may have been homosexual. As we understand that term today, it is said to be "okay" with American society. But in the 1940s? Probably not.

Google has extensive writings on Beck and Binder, but nowhere do they mention whether either man was married. At any rate, even if an artist is gay, he can avoid drawing pics of pretty women getting spanked; but surely there is no need to show M/M scenes? And yet, there were many such, in the Captain Marvel years.

Web-Ed, our majordomo here, seems to indicate in his writing that he much prefers M/F over any other configuration, and especially over M/M. If that's the case, my hat is off to him. As I've written before, I cannot believe that God would have created females with such large, round, lovely TARGETS if He did not intend for them to get spanked.

Cheers,
Dan

[Dave Wolfe]

Adding my seven cents here!

Your knowledge of comics history is always impressive, Web-Ed!

Dan, I understand how the F/m and M/m scenes cause your gorge to rise! It might help moderate that reaction to consider that Cap's target audience at the time was kids, who enjoy the slapstick "serve the bastid right" kind of instant justice. But, I know, it's still kinda squicky to me, too!

There is an excellent account of Fawcett's line in Jim Steranko's 1970's "History of the Comics, Volume 2," which included the magician Ibis ("Eye-bis"), Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Phantom Eagle and various other aviator heroes and heroines, like their adaptation of the radio hero Captain Midnight!

The mags were frequently better written and better drawn than the DC line. In fact, Cap often outsold Superman by a considerable margin, which, I think, largely explains the constant "copyright" lawsuits. DC lost the first several rounds in court, as Cap and Superman were, in truth, quite dissimilar, especially in tone. Captain Marvel was always more tongue-in-cheek.

(And if were going to talk about copies, let's note that Cap's younger cohort, Captain Marvel Junior, and his sister, Mary Marvel, were flying high long before Superboy and Supergirl showed up across the street!)

Anyway, when the comics biz took a huge dip in the 50's, Fawcett decided it wasn't worthwhile to keep at it, and certainly not worth the trouble of going back and forth to court, and ceased all efforts!

DC bought up the rights to the characters and revived a lot of them in the late 70's and early 80's.