Threats and Missed Opportunities

[web-ed]

There seem to have been a lot of these in Golden Age Marvel, and while I don't want to overdo it (I don't present everything I find), I think these make the cut for a variety of reasons, one of which is introducing CSR readers to Nellie and Tessie. Let's start with one more pratfall for Millie the Model, from Gay Comics where all three girls appeared for a time. The artist is Dan DeCarlo and he has Millie butt-up on her hands and knees in two panels as well - fine spanking position! As a matter of fact, DeCarlo often posed Millie bending over in the issues I have reviewed so far, but Stan Lee (who scripted this story) did not write any spankings for Millie as far as I know although we just saw that one of Chili in Millie #27 over on the main site.


From Gay Comics #40 (October 1949 - last issue); script by Stan Lee, pencils by Dan DeCarlo, inker unknown but could be DeCarlo's long-time inker Rudy Lapick. Pain stars plus rubbing is always good!

Two issues earlier we found Nellie the Nurse, whose stories often featured a lot of silly slapstick humor, also taking a pratfall:


From Gay Comics #38 (June 1949), personnel unknown.

[web-ed]

The success of Millie the Model led to two imitations, Nellie the Nurse and Tessie the Typist. As I mentioned, Nellie featured a lot of slapstick humor, and there was another pratfall, this time of another nurse named Pamela, who functioned in the strip as an antagonist for Nellie much as Chili did for Millie:


From Nellie the Nurse #15 (October 1948), personnel unknown.

Not a very good scene because the panel is blacked out, but there is some odd butt-to-butt contact earlier on the page.

The silly slapstick in Nellie (who is still a brunette here but eventually became a redhead) did not always result in a pratfall, and this next charming episode features a car crash that results in Nellie hanging over a tree branch in a most delightful orientation, namely bending over:


From Nellie the Nurse #12 (April 1948), personnel unknown.

So no pratfall for once, but the missed opportunity with Nellie in spanking position is at least as good (nice work by our unknown artist). I think I've searched through all of Nellie's appearances and she never got spanked, but Tessie wasn't so lucky as we'll see next.

[web-ed]

The last and probably shortest-lived of Marvel's three career-girl titles during this period was Tessie the Typist. Despite the title, Tessie was not as tied to her vocation as were Millie and Nellie, and often worked at jobs other than typing. There were temperamental differences as well: where Millie was generally sweet and Nellie was too busy taking pratfalls to show much of a personality, Tessie showed definite abusive tendencies toward her boyfriend Skidsy, who once threatened her with a spanking, and her self-centeredness earns her the OTK treatment from her father, unfortunately off-panel.

Let's first take a look at Tessie in a position very similar to Nellie's last time:





From Gay Comics #23 (April 1946), personnel unknown. Interesting what part of Tessie's anatomy Skidsy is pointing at, isn't it?

The story is too silly to bother summarizing, but Tessie becomes a waitress after somehow not knowing that her boyfriend Skidsy owns a restaurant. Skidsy really should have spanked her for all the physical abuse she gives him, even though the over-the-shoulder position is terribly awkward.

[web-ed]

I really don't know if this one is innocent or not. It's from 1946 when World War II was over, and yet the gag is based around the practice of offering discounts to servicemen. The price of admission is only 25 cents for servicemen at this movie theatre, but Tessie "misinterprets" the sign that says "Service Men 25¢" and, offering the ticket-seller $1.00, requests four sailors!


The cover of Tessie the Typist #6 (September 1946), personnel unknown.

The poor man (who looks like Skidsy) is left at a loss for words. "Uh, what exactly did you want those four sailors for, Miss?" Need we add that he would have been justified in spanking her on the spot?

[web-ed]

Now let's see Tessie earning that spanking threat from Skidsy, who's seen in the last panel trying to catch her so he can take her OTK:


The bossy Tessie insists on fixing Skidsy's broken watch herself.



From Tessie the Typist #20 (February 1949), personnel unknown.

Unfortunately, Tessie knows nothing about fixing watches, so she makes things worse, increasing the price of a competent repair from $10 to $75 - and remember that $75 in 1946 was more than many people made in a week. No wonder Skidsy wants to spank her! And what is this garbage about a gentleman never spanking a lady? We've heard that B.S. before and we're not buying it! I wonder if he ever caught up with her...

[web-ed]

By now I'm sure everyone is convinced that Tessie deserved to get spanked (not that CSR readers generally take much convincing about women needing spankings!). What finally does the trick is Skidsy being assigned to report on the result of an election that Tessie's father would rather forget. Let's see:





Finally, someone spanks Tessie the Typist! From Gay Comics #39 (August 1949) and complete with both rubbing and pain stars a-flying.

The artist is Morris Weiss, who may have scripted as well and who worked on a number of Marvel's teen humor characters including Patsy Walker. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Tessie certainly had it coming to her. Unfortunately, this is the only spanking I know of for her, but I'm still going slowly through Marvel's Golden Age books and we can hope I'll find more.

[hugob00m]

AND IT"S ABOUT TIME!

Hi Web-ed. For me, the fact that the spanking she finally gets is out-of-frame and that it's paternal sort of compensate for each other.

Of course, it would've been more fun to see Skidsy spank her in-frame, but unfortunately, Marvel didn't give us that.

And so, it seems that the best we have is to finish the watch-fixing story in our imaginations. I'd like to think that he caught up with her, turned her over his knee on a public bench, and maybe even raised her skirt, to give her a long hard spanking!

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

I know the young Spankos back in the day was more disappointed reading this comic than we are now why would you cut out the best part everyone would have love seeing Tessie over her POP`s knee getting her bottom Tan instead it cut to the after spanking! maybe Marvel should cut out the fight scenes in Thor! Iron man and Hulk and just cut to seeing the villains defeated

[web-ed]

Two more missed opportunities in Golden Age Marvel comics, unsurprisingly from that idiot Georgie's comic although the second one came from the Cindy strip. First, a kangaroo who's arguably brighter than Georgie wags his tail at the wrong moment, whacking the tail of a passing redhead:


From Georgie #14 (January 1948)


Then four issues later, Cindy wishes that her rival Sandra would "fall flat on her flat head," but what Sandra falls on isn't too flat and it certainly isn't her head:


From Georgie #18 (Septembery 1948)

[web-ed]

Let's fast forward about four decades to see two missed opportunities from the humor comic book Hugo. This was a rather charming strip created by Milton Knight Jr. and published by Fantagraphics some time back in the late 80s or early 90s. As I remember it, Hugo is in love with Princess Trish, but things don't always go smoothly for the poor guy. Perhaps he was yielding to sexual frustration in the first issue with Knight's promo for issue #2 - "look out" indeed! Princess Trish bends over while distracted by some footprints, stretching her dress tight and giving Hugo (if that is he with the slinghshot) an irresistible target:


© Milton Knight Jr.

Trish got only one actual spanking that we know of (we don't have any of the issues) for coming home late after a wild party, and it's off-panel, but let's take a look at it:


© Milton Knight Jr.

Knight does a good job with Trish's expressions, but this is a paternal spanking from her father the king, and as much as we like to see princesses get spanked it would have been more exciting to see Hugo, perhaps frustrated again, taking Trish over his knee.

Knight is a good cartoonist, but he's obviously not into spanking and simply used it as a humorous device much as the great cartoonists of the past did.

My records don't indicate where I got these (I've had them in the files for years), but if someone sent them to me, thanks very much and don't hesitate to comment and get the credit you deserve.

[hugob00m]

This is a bit of an odd one. Most of the characters seem to be anthropomorphic animals. Trish's father clearly has a bulldog face, but the only animal trait Trisha has is her dog-like nose. Other than the nose, she looks like a human woman... a very well-shaped human woman. And that tight white dress certainly shows off her curves. In the post-spank panel, we can even see the bulge of her nipples! How did they get away with that in those days?

As you said, it's too bad the only spanking she got was from her father.

The guy with the slingshot looks like his aim is off. Instead of hitting her butt, he's going to knock that little crown off of her head.

Sandra sure looks like she landed on something other than her "flat head"... but maybe during that reverse-somersault, she hit her head before completing a turn and winding up on her butt.

The Kangaroo butt-slap was something I've bever seen before. Kudos for some original thinking,

[web-ed]

This is a bit of an odd one. Most of the characters seem to be anthropomorphic animals. Trish's father clearly has a bulldog face, but the only animal trait Trisha has is her dog-like nose. Other than the nose, she looks like a human woman... a very well-shaped human woman. And that tight white dress certainly shows off her curves. In the post-spank panel, we can even see the bulge of her nipples! How did they get away with that in those days?

The Fantagraphics line was intended for adults and often featured nudity, although explicit sexual acts were confined to its Eros sub-label which was keeping Fantagraphics as a whole afloat. None of these books were ever submitted for approval to the Comics Code Authority (of course the Eros line would not have passed muster in any case), which is how they got away with what we see in Hugo. (The Code never had the actual power to prevent publication, so they couldn't do anything about the books that weren't submitted to them).

In this, Fantagraphics was clearly following in the tradition of underground comics. Despite some occasional problems with local censorship laws (as in a Lansing, Illinois case I followed because I knew the comics store manager there), for the most part the government left these alternative comics alone.

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

this was more of a off panel spanking than Missed Opportunity! said this before hate it when movies and comics writes a spanking in their story only to have it happen off screen

[hugob00m]

Hi, Web-ed

The Fantagraphics line was intended for adults and often featured nudity, although explicit sexual acts were confined to its Eros sub-label which was keeping Fantagraphics as a whole afloat. None of these books were ever submitted for approval to the Comics Code Authority (of course the Eros line would not have passed muster in any case), which is how they got away with what we see in Hugo. (The Code never had the actual power to prevent publication, so they couldn't do anything about the books that weren't submitted to them).

That makes sense.

[web-ed]

We've seen a lot of the Marvel Golden Age teen humor titles lately, what with Millie, Nellie, Tillie, and Patsy Walker who seems to have been the inspiration for the second of the two scenes from Quality Comics' Candy we're going to see here. First is a bit that's so dumb it shouldn't even be included here, but I saved it to my files for some reason, so here goes: Candy and her boyfriend Ted try to help out in a museum, but apparently advanced paleontology is beyond their meager skill set (who could have foreseen that?). Result: they get kicked out, literally.


Candy and Ted get the boot. We need hardly add that Candy should have been spanked instead. From Candy #7 (December 1948).

Next for a story that recalls Patsy Walker #7 (see Comics Gallery 2 on the main site). Yes, Candy is going to learn to drive (scary thought). She ends up exactly the same way Patsy did, with a sore behind although no pillow strapped on it:


Candy won't be sitting comfortably any time soon! Too bad we didn't get to see the actual spanking. From Candy #36 (March 1953)

The similarities are fairly obvious, and the Candy scene is from 1953, seven years after Patsy's spanking in 1946. Now it's possible that Harry Sahle didn't copy Jaffee's story, but we've never liked his work so we're probably too biased to give an opinion on the plagiarism question here. The cramped composition of the panels and the weak storytelling of the layout is typical of Sahle, so I suppose we should be grateful for the two on-panel spankings Candy received, the better one being in issue #3 (in which it was shoehorned into a too-small panel - drat that Sahle!).

But we're not quite done with the "teen-age daughter gets spanked over driving issues" plot, as a suspiciously-similar story turned up 13 years later and we'll see it in our next post below.

[web-ed]

Let's fast-forward ahead to 1966, where the short-lived Tower Comics has their own Archie-imitating title called Tippy Teen. The lead character in this story is called Go-Go instead of Candy, but these two pages are going to seem mighty familiar:




Go-Go has the same complaint that Candy did after being spanked by her father, and we have the same complaint we had then: why couldn't the spanking have been on-panel instead? From Tippy Teen #4 (April 1966).

This is obviously a copy of the Candy story, but then when you're copying Archie as obviously as Tippy is (Tippy and her boyfriend Tommy look a lot like Betty and Archie) it probably doesn't matter. If Harry Sahle only had the good taste to show Candy's spanking maybe we'd have had Go-Go's on panel here as well.

Thanks to Robin for putting me wise to this one. I think I have only one more silly teen scene left (not counting some fair-to-middling Archie stuff), from Harvey's Mazie (their answer to Archie), but as it's F/M and similar to a Veronica/Reggie scene I vaguely remember I'm really in no hurry to post it. And of course the Marvel Golden Age search continues - slowly - to be followed by more research into the Archie titles.

By the way, in case anyone's wondering, my usual practice is to post off-panel spanking scenes like these here in the forum as I did in this case. I posted the Patsy Walker stuff over on the main site so that I could more easily make some points about it without running into the two-picture limit and other restrictions that exist here on the Bulletin Board.

[hugob00m]

Hi, Web-ed.

As you say, they're silly stories, but they're fun.

The artist's style in Tippy Teen was sure a lot like Dan Decarlo's. Go-go looked a lot like Veronica from Archie and the blonde friend looked a lot like Melody from Josie.

I don't really have a problem with paternal spankings being off-screen. There aren't (or at least, SHOULDN'T BE) any erotic overtones, the way there might be if her boyfriend spanked her.

The naughty girls looked cute with rays and stars indicating sore backsides. And I like the thought that soon they are going to go to school, where they will have to sit (ever so gingerly) on those hard chairs!

[willjohn]

Tessie's effort with her boyfriend's watch reminded me of my mother talking about her oldest brother. He would take clocks apart and put them back together again. The repaired clocks always worked but they always had parts left over.

[web-ed]

Two more rather silly examples from Millie the Model. First, a male model drops poor Millie on the floor, fanny-first. At least there are two panels with pain stars:


From Millie the Model #41 (April 1953). Script by Stan Lee; art by Dan DeCarlo. © Marvel Characters Inc.


Then bad advice from Daisy leaves Millie rather upset with her:


From Mad About Millie #9 (March 1970). Script by Stan Lee; art by Stan Goldberg. © Marvel Characters Inc.

I suppose we don't have any good reason to be upset with this one since a Millie/Daisy spanking wouldn't have been that much more interesting. Still no known actual spankings of Millie and at this point (I'm currently working through the year 1960) I don't really expect to find any, but I will keep searching as there were some Millie titles and one-shots I haven't gotten to yet.

[willjohn]

Millie being dropped looked like Betty being dropped by Archie.