Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

The Humorama Spanking Cartoons!

#147 - Wenzel Marriage Counsellor Spanking

Cover of Fun House, perhaps no longer officially called Fun House Comedy (February 1980). From the collection of and posted by the Web-Ed on 07/05/2013 (click to double-size).

After about 1962, Humorama began to change. The vast quantity of cartoons they had published during the preceding seven years allowed them to continue publishing a number of digests (plus the full-sized Popular Jokes) using mainly reprinted material. Possibly the unavailability of many of their ablest contributors had something to do with this also: Jack Cole and Jefferson Machamer were dead; of the Big Six spanking cartoonists Homer Provence and George Morrice appear to have vanished, although we don't want to reverse cause and effect since it may be that Humorama simply stopped buying their cartoons along with everyone else's; Dan DeCarlo had left Humorama around 1960 to work exclusively for Archie, and Kirk Stiles retired to Florida. That leaves us with the very interesting cases of the two Bills, Ward and Wenzel.

Both men were certainly still actively cartooning, Wenzel into the 80's and Ward into the 90's. We still don't know how much Ward contributed to Humorama during its last twenty years, 1963-1983, but we had seen an occasional drawing by Wenzel from the latter half of this period in their remaining publications that, because it contained full-frontal nudity, could not have been a reprint of pre-1963 material and which proved Wenzel was still actively contributing. And then we came across a low-quality scan of the cover at left: we could make out a spanking and were fairly sure it had to be Wenzel's work, but couldn't discern any of the details. Not until March 2013 were we able to obtain this issue, and when we did we found not only the cover spanking but three more Wenzel spanking cartoons as well, all of them apparently dating from the 1970's! Let's take a closer look at the first of these now.

From the cover of Fun House Comedy (February 1980, click to double-size).

This is the fourth cartoon we have seen with the theme being a marriage counsellor who spanks wives, Kirk Stiles having done two (here and here) and George Morrice one (here). The gag is pretty much the same - marriage counsellor solves marital problems by teaching the husband to spank the wife - as this theme doesn't lend itself well to much in the way of variations. The principal differences between this one and the earlier cartoons are

1. Wide ties and lapels on the men tell us it isn't the early 1960's any more.
2. Wenzel's style, never too tight, has become even more loose.
3. The spankee-wife's bottom is bare!

Looking back over the Humorama cartoons we've posted without knowing the original publication date, we find that there's one which almost certainly dates from the 70's - Rump Roast - also by Wenzel. So Wenzel, who really got the ball rolling back in 1955 with the first Humorama modern spanking cartoon, may also have been the last man still contributing "spankers" to Humorama twenty years later, unless it turns out that Ward did some also during that time.