We like Queen-spanking, but "Queen spanks Princess" is pretty good, too, and that's what we have here in the first of three examples from Milton Caniff's great strip Steve Canyon. In this case, the Princess has been selfish and disresprectful, so her mother the Queen takes matters into her hands and her daughter over her knee to "make her a better queen" when her day comes.
Caniff was a very influential artist, but in one respect we think it was he who was influenced by someone else here, namely Lee Falk, whose Phantom did not hesitate to spank Queen Pera when necessary to take her down a peg. Despite having featured at least four spankings in his comics that we know of, we doubt that Caniff was a spanko, so he must have picked up the idea of humbling the highborn from somewhere, and we figure Falk's work on The Phantom or Mandrake is the likeliest place.
Date believed to be February 22, 1981 [later confirmed]. © Field Enterprises Syndicate. Posted by the Web-Ed on 01/21/2011.
