Threats and Missed Opportunities

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

can`t believe how many off screen and miss opportunities spanking Patsy comics had!!!

[web-ed]

can`t believe how many off screen and miss opportunities spanking Patsy comics had!!!

Yeah, Butch, there were a lot, and we'll be seeing three more of them, beginning just below.

[web-ed]

This week I'm posting the spanking of Patsy Walker's bad side (on her backside) by her good side that took place in Patsy Walker #34 over on the main site. While researching the title, I found a similar good side / bad side conflict, this time with Patsy's rival Hedy Wolfe, in a somewhat earlier issue (#20). Because of this similarity, I thought it would complement the actual spanking nicely even though it's only a boot to the behind, so here it is:




From Patsy Walker #20 (January 1949). Script and art by Al Jaffee. © Marvel Characters Inc.

I suppose Hedy deserves a swift kick even if her rather feeble good side doesn't, but she deserves a good spanking more - and we'll see that she herself agrees early next year!

[hugob00m]

Hi, Web-ed.

This looks like TWO missed opportunities! I would've liked to see Hedy's "bad self" get a good spanking in that tight red bodysuit! And then, of course, Buzz should've spanked Hedy herself for giving in to her bad impulses and spreading rumors about Patsy! A great closing panel would've been Hedy and the little devil on her shoulder both rubbing their sore backsides!

[willjohn]

Guardian angels and personal demons. A bit juvenile isn't it?

[hugob00m]

Seeing this story reminded me that I had an idea for O.T. Katie with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. I don't know when I'll post it, because I still have one more episode of Katie's ghost story and the conclusion of the I.D. story after that. By then, it'll be time for Christmas.... and I've already prepared something for that.

Katie's going to have a very busy end-of-year... and a very red rear end!

[hugob00m]

It might be a while before I post a whole story about Katie with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other... but I think I'll do a little preview:

Katie's devil and angel preview.jpg (258.06 KiB) Viewed 1421 times

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

Both good and bad Katie needs a good long hard spanking

[web-ed]

Guardian angels and personal demons. A bit juvenile isn't it?

Yes of course, but remember this was a device symbolizing the conflict between evil impulses and the individual's conscience, and primarily aimed at young people (it was used in comic books and, I believe, animated cartoons) who were probably not yet mature enough to handle the more serious approach in something like Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Still, I agree it's of limited interest here at CSR unless there's a spanking (as in Patsy Walker #34) or at least a good booting as in the above (and I probably wouldn't have bothered if it were not for the similarity with that earlier scene).

[web-ed]

As the innuendo here is quite mild (compared to, say, the phallic symbols we've seen in Honey Bunn), I wouldn't bother with this one if it were not for the fact that I think it helps convey the overall tone and tenor of the Golden Age Timely (Marvel) teen humor books, on which I'm lavishing considerable time and effort just now. And mild though the "petting" reference may have been by today's standards, teen humor and romance comics pretty much avoided this topic like the plague at the time (1949) so this example is an exception.

And yet why should that have been? Some other time when discussing the 1950s (e.g. in tracing the history of the spanking cartoon) we can tackle the subject of the period's prevailing sexual mores in greater detail, but for now it suffices to point out that by this time teen-age petting among the middle class had been taking place for 25 years or more so was it still considered all that scandalous? There were certainly definite limits as to what was going on (see F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise for some oblique references to "petting parties" if my memory serves). Patsy does have the good grace to be shyly embarrassed here, and probably such things had led to a lot of flapper spankings back in the roaring 20s twenty-five years earlier.


From Patsy Walker #22 (May 1949). Story and pencils (and maybe inks too) by Al Jaffee.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed Patsy's auburn hair, in contrast to the flaming red color we've seen this week in issue #41 and last week in #34. I thought I'd recently addressed that question, but I can't find the post now so I'll repeat that Marvel's earlier red-headed teen, Cindy, was far less popular than Patsy and once her book was cancelled there was an open slot for another red-head, so Stan Lee apparently decided that Patsy Walker should fill it.

[willjohn]

What does scatters think a pet store would sell?

[web-ed]

What does scatters think a pet store would sell?

Jaffee may have intended Patsy's momentary scatterbrained condition to show that she was quite taken with the good-looking store clerk. That at least would be the charitable interpretation. And anyway, we wouldn't want her to be bright enough to avoid getting spanked, now would we? (Currently, Patsy's Spanking Score is two off-panel and two on, including the time she got caned as Hellcat).

[web-ed]

It might be a while before I post a whole story about Katie with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other... but I think I'll do a little preview:



Katie's devil and angel preview.jpg

Didn't mean not to comment on this one, B00m - I must be getting as scatterbrained as poor Patsy (see the discussion above) . Anyway, I think such a storyline for O. T. Katie has some real humorous potential, if you ever have the time to get to it. (I know you've got a lot of other irons in the fire just now).

[web-ed]

We'll be getting back to Marvel Golden Age stuff here shortly, at the same time we do on the main site, but in the mean time here's one I came across quite recently. It's from the first and only issue (as far as anyone knows) of Dolly Dill, a rather unusual comic.

The indicia lists "Newsstand Publications" as the copyright holder, but this must have been one of Martin Goodman's many corporations (the great number was for tax reasons) because the copyright was renewed in 1973 by Marvel Comics. It was originally published some time in 1945. Nobody knows for certain when although the month of August is believed by some, nor is the creative team known. Because the time is uncertain, we don't know if the editor was Vince Fago or Stan Lee (or someone else?). (Fago had taken for Lee at Marvel/Timely when the latter joined the U.S. Army in World War II. Lee might have been discharged by August, 1945, but as indicated above I haven't seen convincing proof that this comic hit the newsstands at exactly that time, or later.)

Superficially, this is just another "Female gets butted by goat/kicked by mule" type of scene, but there's something distinctly odd about it that's hard to describe. Dolly seems to be some sort of aspiring detective, but if she's a private investigator why does she have "P.D." painted on her motorcycle? [Not shown, which I forgot when I wrote this.] Anyway, let's take a look at it before doing any more gabbing:


Dolly's behind is in serious jeopardy as a mule prepares to deliver a swift kick on the cover of Dolly Dill (#1 on the cover although it isn't numbered in the indicia).


Dolly is on the trail of an innocent man she believed to be a criminal, and gets butted by a bull instead of the mule on the cover - don't ask us why. Note that the colorist had the wit to color Dolly's skirt a bright red!

[web-ed]

Only two pictures per post, so here's the rest:


The "butting" panel.


Bull removed, possibly in more ways than one, leaving Dolly in the bent-over position and with the "Smack!" relocated to suggest a paddling. Alterations by Web-Ed.

Four things make this scene different from other similar ones we can recall: (1) Dolly is propelled in the bending-over position, implying that was her pose prior to being butted instead of showing that pose. In other words, the story layout is a little odd. (2) Dolly's body is rather limp in flight, which we think adds to the effect but is again not the way these scenes are usually done. (3) Dolly exclaims, "Yeow!" and "Somebody hit me from the rear!" which also emphasizes the butting and makes it similar to a paddle-swat, at least in our feverish imagination. And (4) when you add this to the mule kick on the cover, it's a lot of emphasis on a quasi-spanking activity.

Interestingly, no "#1" was listed in the indicia although it was printed on the cover. [Note: when I wrote this post, I erroneously forgot that while "#1" was not listed in the indicia it was indeed printed on the cover, and I have since corrected the preceding sentence and one below. Given this fact, the mystery is considerably lessened and it may well be that readers didn't respond well to material this odd, causing the book's cancellation after one issue.] Was this intended as some sort of weird one-shot? That wasn't the Marvel/Timely business model in 1945. Were the sales terrible, or was paper still in such short supply (as it had been during the War) that Timely had to sacrifice some of its titles, and this was one of them? But in either of those cases, surely "#1" would still have been printed in the indicia.

One possibility that occurs to me is that Dolly Dill was intended as some kind of filler strip but was never used for that purpose (perhaps because the book(s) it was intended for were cancelled). With the war over and perhaps inventory piling up, Timely decided to print the strips together as a one-shot so as not to completely waste their investment in them. We know that excess inventory was what ended the original Marvel Bullpen, where artists actually worked in a big room at Marvel's offices, around 1952 and left Stan Lee and Flo Steinberg by themselves in a small office while the artists, now freelancers, worked from home. (The "Marvel Bullpen" as in the "Bullpen Bulletins" feature that many of us remember from Marvel comics in the 1960s and 70s, was entirely figurative).

In any case, we think this is a pretty good scene and thank the writer and artist - whoever they were, now presumably long gone - who provided it for us.

[hugob00m]

Hi, Web-ed.

That's an odd one alright. The oddest thing to me is the discrepancy of how the title character os depicted. On the cover, she's drawn to look pretty, but not in the story when she's being propelled skyward by the bull. Was it different artists for the cover and the story? Was it an attempt to de-eroticize her as she was flying with her hind end sticking up? We may never know.

[web-ed]

I recently found another Dolly Dill in an issue of Gay Comics from the 40s, so it does indeed appear to have been some sort of filler strip. Not all the issues of Gay Comics are available, but I'll continue to search those that are. While I have discovered one off-panel spanking in the title, there is nothing of interest from this latest Dolly.

However, other Golden Age Timely (Marvel) comics continue to provide us with more in the way of missed opportunities. This week, we're seeing Patsy Walker #41 over on the main site, but four issues earlier we had a fun "Behind in Jeopardy" scene in which Patsy is menaced by a neighborhood kid with a toy bow and arrow. The kid shoots an arrow into the air, and where it fell poor Patsy's aware - all too keenly :


Patsy chooses an inopportune time to bend over - good shooting, kid! Nice "pain stars" and rubbing in the follow-up panel, too. From Patsy Walker #37 (November, 1951). © Marvel Characters Inc.

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

The kid knew where to aim that arrow also how much pain the toy arrow brought to Patsy's behind

[hugob00m]

The toy arrow jabbing Patsy's butt was kind of funny... but it would've been even netter if the story had contained a "window boy" scenario.

Shw could've threated to spank Skipalong, chased him around the house, got stuck in the window when it unexpectedly went shut, and gave him an opportunity to spank her instead.

Maybe even Skipalong's daddy could spank her too... for dereliction of duty!

Too bad Jaffee didn't do it that way.

[web-ed]

Last time we saw Patsy take a toy arrow to her rear end. Apparently someone at Marvel thought putting poor Patsy's behind in further jeopardy was a good idea (and who are we to disagree ) for only two years later they were at it again. First, though, they gave the pratfall treatment to Wendy Parker, a filler strip that never really caught on, in Patsy and Hedy #17 (July 1953).

Wendy was a little older than Patsy, being a college student, and in this story she has a crush on a handsome professor, faking a twisted ankle. However, it's not her ankle but her fanny she should be worrying about :


Wendy Parker gets unceremoniously dumped on her rear end. Some nice pain stars, but a spanking from the perturbed professor would have been better. From Patsy and Hedy #17 (July 1953). Pencils by Al Jaffee. Inker unknown but may have been George Klein. The scripter is unknown. © Marvel Characters Inc.

Wendy may have been older than Patsy at this time, but she wasn't nearly as popular, which is probably why only five issues later it's Patsy's behind taking the punishment again. This time, archrival Hedy Wolfe puts a thumbtack on Patsy's chair to get her to "volunteer" to stay after school and help teacher:


Credits same as above in issue #17. © Marvel Characters Inc.