......... Chicago Spanking Review - Secretary Spanking #A6

Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

Rivals of Humorama

#22 - Secretary Spanking #A6

Cover of Hello Buddies #39 (1948, month not given but Web-Ed believes it was sometime between August and October. Cover cartoon by Don Flowers. Click to increase in size).

Last time we saw a single butt-slap from Hello Buddies #62 (1953), which as we remarked there we tend to see as another signpost on the way to the full flowering of the Secretary Spanking and, more broadly, of the spanking cartoons to come (for example, Secretary Spanking #A2 (June 1955 but no OTK position), Secretary Spanking #A5 (1954-55, and with the OTK position used for what we now belive to be the second time), and of course the deluge that began with Bill Wenzel's Secretary Spanking #26 in 1955). There are, however, exceptions to neat critical theories, and in this case an anachronistic secretary spanking from 1948 that we recently discovered is one of them. Let's see it now.

secretary spanking cartoon by unknown artist from hello buddies no. 39

What is for now both the earliest Secretary Spanking cartoon and the earliest known OTK spanking cartoon, artist unknown, from Hello Buddies #39 (c. August-October 1948). Discovered by the Web-Ed and posted on 10/13/2023 (click to increase in size).

Although it slightly disrupts our previously-established timeline, this is now the earliest OTK spanking cartoon. We have here a secretary being spanked by the boss, but instead of a sly gag insinuating that the boss's motivation is a concealed love of spanking, we have a paternal scene in which some old goat apparently sees his secretary as a child needing discipline: "Old Blakesly is just like a father to his employees!"

To make matters worse, the editor decided to reduce the cartoon to fit into 1/4 of a digest-sized page, which is tiny and explains the poor reproduction. It is, therefore, impossible to render a fair judgment on the ability of the cartoonist, who is unknown. Of course it's a line-drawing as were all humor cartoons of this era, the great ink-wash efforts of DeCarlo, Wenzel, and Stiles and the conte crayon of Bill Ward being almost ten years in the future, so it's as unspectacular technically as it is thematically. Still, at least for now it has primacy, and we have to wonder if any of the later spanking cartoonists drew any inspiration from it.

The entire digest page in context (click to increase in size).

So, what was Hello Buddies? It ran from 1942 to 1960, and in its early years seemed to be aimed at American service personnel. In fact, you can see the star-shaped "dot" over the "i" in "Buddies" on the cover, a probable holdover to the military styling of 1942. By this time, of course, the war was over and the cartoons had taken on a more civilian tone. Most of the artistic personnel are not familiar to us (that is, we don't remember seeing their work in the Humorama digests). Don Flowers, who did the cover here as well as several spankings we've presented on CSR, is probably the best artist in this issue, with Reamer Keller and Vic Herman being the others CSR readers would have seen before.

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