There Isn’t a Spanking Scene in… Volpone

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Volpone, a sardonic comedy about a rich man who pretends to be terminally ill and grows richer when his greedy acquaintances lavish presents on him in the hope of being named his heir, was written by Ben Jonson in 1605. Things get very dark when one of the legacy-hunters, Corvino, offers his wife, Celia, and once they are alone together, Volpone sheds his sickly disguise and attempts to rape her. Here’s the scene as realized in a Budapest production of 2018:


In 2007, the play was adapted by Soeren Voima for a theater collective in Cologne. In this version, Volpone is a supermarket magnate who has checked into a Catholic nursing home, and the would-be heirs are all out to get control of he business when he dies; Corvino and Celia are renamed Wilfried and Grazyna Raabe. The production gained some notoriety, partly because the director chose to have the title character, played by Martin Reinke, naked for most of the play.

The adaptation was revived at Stuttgart three years later, in a more commercial production that opened on May 29, 2010. Volpone was now played by the popular television presenter Harald Schmidt during his show’s summer break, and the Raabes were Florian von Manteuffel and Sarah Sophia Meyer. Here she is with Volpone, who (thankfully) wore pajamas in this production:

And when her husband presented her as a human gift, it rather looks as though the particular sexual service he had in mind was in tune with our tastes:


Not having seen the production, I have no idea whether it was OTK or Faux-TK, and if it really was a spanking offer, whether anything came of it. But the imagery is nice all the same!

For those who want to know how the story ends: Volpone’s villainy is exposed, and he is sentenced to be confined in harsh conditions until he really is terminally ill. Not nearly so nice, but then I did say it was dark…

The Wrong End

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We begin on the night of April 16, 1920. A sailor named Alfred Hawkins returned home to the Port of London furious with his wife: she hadn’t written him even a single letter while he was away at sea. So he made his way to their house in Canning Town, strode up the stairs and burst into the darkened bedroom, bent on taking husbandly reprisals. The lady occupant was pulled out of bed, and it was only after Hawkins had finished with her that someone brought a light into the room and revealed that the recipient had been Miss Mary Sweeney, who lived next door. He had come into the wrong house in the dark! He apologised before returning to his ship, but she complained to the police, and Hawkins was summarily fined £2 (around £100 today), which was handed over, less court costs, to Miss Sweeney by way of compensation.

A strict regard for historical accuracy compels the acknowledgement that what actually happened, the essence of which is given above, was not quite what was reported as a curiosity story in US newspapers a month later. In London, it was a sordid, trivial incident of a husband hitting (as he thought) his wife in the face. But for American readers, it had become a comical anecdote, thanks to a change someone made concerning exactly what it was that he did.


The transatlantic version also added the detail that the judge was intentionally lenient in consideration that what Hawkins thought he was doing, spanking his wife, was supposedly within his legal rights. (Actually, it wasn’t, but that’s a whole other issue.)

There’s a not dissimilar scenario in the cutesy 1935 cartoon short The Three Bears, in which the intrusion of the blonde porridge thief Chez Bears leads to an inventive slapstick chase in which the bears repeatedly get the worst of it. At one point, all four of them get shut into a closet, and Papa Bear metes out justice in the dark. But then the door swings open, Goldilocks sneaks out and the light floods in to reveal that the one being soundly spanked is Mama Bear.

Most spankings don’t happen in pitch blackness, yet still there is sometimes the potential for mistaken identity to create a miscarriage of justice. The most obvious involves identical twins,


a scenario that is more fully explored here. Nor does it require biological consanguinity: a close similarity in appearance will do, as occurs in a 1934 strand of Paul Robinson’s Etta Kett newspaper strip (1925-74).

It begins with Etta hoping for movie stardom, only to find that there is no work to be had in Hollywood: the place is ‘overrun with beauty contest winners’, all with the same idea. But she is too stubborn to give up and go home, so her concerned boyfriend Phil brings in her father to try and change her mind. What they witness on arrival, though, is Etta swanning around and completely ignoring them, as if she doesn’t know who they are or what they should mean to her; it seems she has somehow acquired the glory she wanted and in the process become insufferably conceited.

Actually not. Etta has one specific asset that has gotten her work: she and movie star Sandra Saunders ‘look alike enough to be twins’, so she has been hired to be Sandra’s double. Sandra is being pestered (and there’s also a kidnap plot in the air), so she tips off the studio doorman, who duly sees off Phil when he tries to call on Etta. He infers that Etta has taken Sandra Saunders as a stage name and tells Mr Kett, ‘ If her head gets any bigger she couldn’t get it in a two-car garage.’ Kett is annoyed that his daughter is ‘getting high hat’, so he too goes to the studio intending to ‘take some of the conceit’ out of her, which he does like this:


And so the truth comes out:


Sometimes it’s clothes that make the woman – and literally so in the case of a 1940 edition of the comical strip Big Top, written and drawn by Bernard Dibble (1899-1961). Circus performer Butch is tasked to pose as a farmer in the audience looking for his wife Sophronie who has got lost in the crowd. She is played by his fellow artiste Bill, and the act includes the following comical improvisation:


You will perhaps be relieved to know that this is not Bill in drag. He evidently made a good job of the costume and make-up, because ‘Sophronie’ is a dead ringer for Hettie McBuff, who is not only one of the richest women in the world, but also the owner of the circus – meaning the episode ends with Butch fleeing in discomfiture.

The coincidence is just as forced in the Bollywood musical Shandaar (Magnificent; 1990), in which the truck driver hero Shanker (Mithun Chakraborthy) is provoked into chasing after Tulsi (Juhi Chawla), a girl in a yellow sari. He cunningly traps… a girl in a yellow sari, putting a bag over her head before putting her over his knee.

Unfortunately it’s the wrong girl in a yellow sari.

She should have been spanked

She was spanked

It’s rich girl Rani (Meenakshi Sheshadri), and the upshot is justified indignation – as well as a sore bottom!

(Oh, and romance too, in due course…)

To err is human, but if you want a real mess-up, leave it to the machines. In a 1942 adventure for the Golden Age version of DC superhero the Flash, his girlfriend Joan Williams is buying a new dress from a department store that is being menaced by protection racketeers. Rather bizarrely, the Flash intends to deal with them using a spanking machine he has rigged up (since obviously the police and jail won’t suffice), but it is Joan who blunders into it:


The machine has no mercy, but the embarrassment all belongs to the Flash himself, and it’s surely Joan who gets the worst of it.

Kenneth Tynan once defined a humanist as a man who remembers the faces of the girls he spanks. But perhaps it is even more important to make sure you’re spanking the right girl to begin with!

Felons, Not Engaged in Their Employment

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On the afternoon of March 7, 1917, just a month before America entered the First World War, 19-year-old Mrs Leona Galloway was startled to discover an intruder in her home on West 32nd Street, Los Angeles. The man roughly demanded to know where she kept her valuables, and she defiantly told him that there was nothing in the house worth stealing: no money, no jewels, nothing at all. The man didn’t believe her, and what he did next came so far out of left field that it’s tempting to suppose that it might have been a spicy concoction of the American press.

He put her across his knee and spanked her.

The strange thing is that, although some of the alleged facts seem to have mutated to make a better story as it spread in newsprint across America, the spanking goes right back to the very first reports published in Los Angeles within 24 hours of the incident – reports with enough precise circumstantial detail to command credence. One thing we can be sure of is that Mrs Galloway really was spanked by a burglar.

Of course, he was trying to force her to reveal where the swag was, and the extent and severity of the spanking is directly attributable to the fact that there wasn’t any, and that he didn’t believe her when she told him so. According to the early, unvarnished accounts, he eventually gave up, helped himself to some small change that happened to be on the dressing table and made his escape. She was taken to hospital to be treated for hysteria and minor injuries to the base of her spine, and the police set about searching for a perp they nicknamed ‘Spud the Spanker’, though there’s no evidence that he was ever brought to justice.

The gingered-up version, incidentally, said that, unable to take any more, she told him the loot was in her sewing box. He released her, seized the box and made off with it. The actual contents amounted to a single banknote – and, what’s more, a Confederate one, which had been worthless for half a century. Crime does not pay!

It’s not only the facts that may shift as real life turns into a story: the tone can too. It must have been a dreadful ordeal for Mrs Galloway, but the press treated it mainly as an amusing curiosity item. It got a slightly different approach from a Santa Ana paper which thundered that, for his heinous deed, ‘Spud’ should go to jail for life and then serve an extra ten years for the burglary, but any ethical astringency there was obviously well leavened with dry irony.

Partly that’s because spanking wasn’t then regarded as a very serious assault. Twenty years later, in 1937, another ‘spanking burglar’, 31-year-old Edward McMahon, was at his illicit work in Michigan when he noticed the bedroom he was burglarizing also contained a sleeping woman. He was idiotically unable to resist the impulse to pull her out of bed in her nightdress and give her a good spanking; but when the law caught up with him, he was sent down for twelve years purely on six counts of robbery, with no spanking on the charge sheet.

The other factor is that spanking, because undignified, has something inescapably comical about it. Here we must remember the fundamental truth that comedy depends on distance and detachment: events that are funny to watch or contemplate as part of a story may be distressing if they’re happening to you. And once an incident gets into the newspapers, it’s already halfway to being narrative, albeit not yet presented as fiction.

Yet there aren’t many spanking burglars in actual fiction. A rare example appears in the British film farce Pimple’s Good Turn (1915), which was retitled Flivver’s Good Turn for the American market.

Pimple, played by Fred Evans, was the hapless hero of a series of comedy shorts made between 1912 and 1922. The person he does the good turn for is his friend Archibald (Joe Evans), who is in danger of losing his girlfriend after her mother declares that only a hero is good enough to marry into her family. So he and Pimple need to do something to make him appear heroic in Mrs Higgins’ eyes. The scheme they hatch involves Pimple noisily breaking into the house so as to wake Mrs H. and then threatening her with violence, leaving it up to Archibald to intervene, save her and thereby establish his heroic credentials and worthiness to become the fiancé of the daughter of the house. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, getting the right house to burgle would be a step in the right direction. But while Pimple is effecting an illegal entry into the wrong house, some real burglars arrive at Mrs Higgins’ place. And while they are jemmying their way in, Pimple has encountered the lady of the other house. The non-arrival of Archibald to save the day means things escalate beyond threats, and the upshot is that the lady gets soundly spanked. It all results in a merry chase in which the police nearly arrest both Pimple and Archibald, but only manage to apprehend their pants, and the film ends with the pair sitting on a wall, disconsolate and trouserless.

One important thing to remember here is that Pimple isn’t really a burglar: he’s just posing as one in a good cause, and the point is underlined by the presence in the story of some genuine crooks too. If we’re looking for an actual spanking burglar character, the closest we’ll get is probably ‘London’ Lonnie, the jewel thief at the center of Sam E. Smyth’s short story ‘The Wife Who Needed Spanking’ (1933).

He’s at work in the dressing room of Mrs Conda Bannister when she comes in and puts the light on, but he evades discovery by slipping into the closet. Conda is about to attend a fancy dress party and is dressed as a leggy Red Riding Hood when she makes a telephone call to a blackmailer who is trying to sell her some of her incriminating letters. Sam hears it all, and keeps up a sardonic sotto voce commentary, including the observation from which the tale takes its title. He is almost caught again when her husband Philip comes in search of his own party costume, but the danger is averted when Conda tells him he will find it elsewhere, and not in her closet. Feeling some obligation, Lonnie repays her by finding out where the blackmailer lives and retrieving the letters, which he leaves for her with a covering note:

‘I was unavoidably delayed in the trunk closet when you telephoned Dayne. I heard your witty repartee with Philip. Pardon me, but you need a damn good spanking. You saved my hide when you told Philip his costume was in his own closet. So I thought the least a gentleman could do was to save your hide. Here are your letters.’

And the story’s outcome is that the wife who needs a spanking doesn’t get one, thanks to the fair-minded burglar, though he also relieves her of some jewels as payment for his services!

So not all burglars come to do harm – or, if you prefer, No Tutti i Ladri Vengono per Nuocere, the title of a short but very complicated 1958 farce by Dario Fo, relevant here because of a 2003 Russian production in which this happened:

(It doesn’t in the original playscript, though.)

The real reason you don’t get many spanking burglars in fiction is simply this: criminals don’t have the right to do it. ‘London’ Lonnie’s benign actions may give him just enough authority to tell Conda she deserves to be spanked, but we’d think rather differently about him if he actually tried it. In stories, spanking tends to be satisfying because it is a punishment for wrongdoers – and who’s the obvious wrongdoer in this kind of scenario?

Obviously pressing this to its natural conclusion will only be of interest in relation to a very small number of cat burglars, or perhaps just one.

Spanking is there in the dynamic right from Catwoman’s very first encounter with Batman,

and it has been happily imagined by fan artists and cosplayers ever since.

But on the other hand, there’s ultimately only one intruder into the household who gets to spank the lady residents legitimately – and he brings things to leave behind, rather than taking them away with him.

Santa Claus: the ultimate spanking anti-burglar!

Was Gladys Spanked?

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Our female protagonist today is the actress Gladys Wallis, a diminutive player of ingenues who achieved no little popularity with American audiences in the 1890s.

In May 1897, T. Daniel Frawley, the actor-manager of a west coast stock company, engaged her for either the summer or a full calendar year (the exact term of the contract was later disputed), and in July she was a big hit in Pudd’nhead Wilson. That one success made her quite a draw for audiences, but, by Frawley’s account, the success also turned, and swelled, her head: she became a diva, impossible to work with and convinced of her own indispensability. The next few months, according to Frawley, saw an escalating sequence of theatrical bad behavior on her part: she persistently arrived late to rehearsals, she tried to upstage the leading lady, Blanche Bates, by wearing the same color dress,

and on another occasion she insisted on chewing gum onstage in the final act of The Great Unknown, with messy consequences.

It came to a head in the fall when she signed a contract to appear with the Tivoli Opera Company, at a much enhanced salary, while she was still committed to Frawley. Keen not to lose a rising star attraction, he was obliged to offer her a hike from $70 a week to $110 – well over $4,000 at today’s values. But the bad behavior continued unchecked.

Eventually, he had to take drastic action or face a mass walkout by other members of the company – but not the kind of drastic action you may be hoping for! In Portland, Oregon, on the night of October 31, she was handed a note formally giving her two weeks’ notice. She haughtily refused to accept this, and was summarily dismissed the next morning after Frawley hastily engaged a replacement soubrette, Lily Wren (who forgot her lines at her first appearance, but got better). In due course the company left, without Gladys, for an engagement in Hawaii, and within weeks she had accepted a renewed offer from the Tivoli. By then she had already announced her intention to sue Frawley for her salary to the end of the season in May 1898, though the demand was later scaled back to just a week’s money, $110. And then the mutual recriminations started.

Before leaving for Honolulu, Frawley gave his version of events in a press interview. He not only recounted the recent stresses of working with Miss Wallis, but also a particularly tense encounter earlier on in their careers, in 1891 when she was in her late teens and they were both appearing as actors with the Crane stock company. According to Frawley, she confronted him with an unfounded allegation that he had been paying improper attentions to another woman in the company. (He gallantly declined to name the lady, but there were two possibilities, Anne O’Neill and Katharine Florence.) Gladys kept on carping about it until finally he could take it no longer: he rounded on her and called her a ‘nasty little faggot’. That didn’t have the same connotations it acquired in later generations, but it was rude enough to make her slap his face…

‘And then I turned her over my knee and spanked her.’

Afterwards the company manager, William H. Crane, took his side and Gladys was forced to apologise; she then became as good as gold for the remaining six months of their contract, which was no doubt why, running his own company some years later, he chose to engage her.

The story of the spanking caused a sensation. Gladys counter-claimed that she had enraged him by snubbing his advances, and while she admitted the substance of the altercation six years earlier, she denied absolutely that she had been spanked. All he did, in her version, was slap her face back, which was arguably less sensational than a spanking but, by the standards of the time, more dishonorable and unmanly. The newspapers seized on the issue, and one ran a headline posing the vital question:

WAS IT A SPANK OR A SLAP?

The case came to court in December, and Gladys testified on her own behalf. The defense offered no witnesses, which had two consequences: the judge could only rule in her favor and award her the $110 demanded; and the disputed question of whether she was slapped or spanked was never addressed in evidence, meaning the spanking did not become a matter of public record, and disappointed newspaper readers never learned the truth of what had happened backstage in 1891. And, sadly, nor shall we!

Have You Seen These Kates?

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After seven years’ work, the series chronicling the spanking stage history of Kiss Me Kate is now finished: every year is covered, so you can start at the very beginning and click through 75 years of onstage spanking right up to last year. But although finished, it is not complete.

I wasn’t always as conscientious as I now am about making a note of which production of Kiss Me Kate generated a particular spanking image, with the result that there are a number of KMK pictures lurking in my files with not enough information attached. In some cases I can put a latest possible date because the file shows when I downloaded it, but that’s all. It’s also conceivable that a few of them, though not many, may be for productions of The Taming of the Shrew rather than Kiss Me Kate.

I’d like to be able to put them into the correct years in the chronological survey of productions, but can only do so if they are properly identified. So, please enjoy the pictures, and if you know (and I mean actually know) which production any of them comes from, please tell me using the comments box. Each picture (or group of pictures) is numbered for ease of reference. There are 45 productions in all.

Twentieth Century

1:

2: This one is perhaps a program cover.

3: This one is almost certainly a program cover.

4: This is probably a high school production.

5:

6:

Skirt Down

7:

8: This is the program cover for a production, probably amateur, in Stockport, England. But I don’t have the year.

9: This small but attractive picture has been said to belong to the 1992 production at Chelmsford, England, but a look at the participants disproves that definitively. In all likelihood it dates from the 1990s, but I know nothing about it.

10: This one may be from anytime since the late 1990s, but I’d guess probably not later than 2010. The production seems to have been in Florida, possibly in or near St Petersburg, but I haven’t been able to pin it down more precisely.

There may be a video available here.

Not Later Than 2003

11:

Not Later Than 2004

12: This is a nice rehearsal shot for a production at ‘East Stroudsburg University’, Pennsylvania, year unknown.

15 KMK East Stroudsburg University rehearsal

Well, that’s the information I noted down when I saved it in August 2004. But it may be a high school production: there is an East Stroudsburg High School South that stages an annual musical, and in 2002 it was KMK.

13: No spanking picture for this one, but the ‘cushion moment’ later on is nicely captured:

14: And just a bit of backstage japery in this production:

Not Later Than 2005

15: Rehearsal and performance photos, both for the same production.

Not Later Than 2006

16:

17:

18:

19:

Not Later Than 2007

20:

21: A production at San Jose, year and exact location unknown.

Not Later Than 2008

22: A terrific, dynamic bloomers spanking, this one.

Bloomers White 2

23: a German production.

Not Later Than 2009

24:

25:

26:

27: This one was uploaded onto a now defunct social media site by the actor playing Fred. Unfortunately, the twerp was so convinced that the only possible interest in the scene was his own face that he cropped the photo accordingly!

(Maybe it serves him right to have been forgotten!)

28:

Not Later Than 2010

29:

30: Another shot of the ‘cushion’ moment:

31:

Not Later Than 2011

32:

33: Rehearsal horseplay of Lois spanking Lilli; the girls are called Gina and Choobie.

34:

35: A Russian production.

36:

37:

Not Later Than 2012

38:

39: Another especially attractive one. A real shame not to have this excellent work properly credited.

01 KMK

Not Later Than 2013

40:

Not Later Than 2014

41: Production identified by Sganarelle (to whom much thanks!) and moved to its proper place in 2010.

Twenty-First Century

42: The next is a still from a video from Boone High School, Iowa, which could (at a pinch) be from the 1990s but is more likely to be from after 2000. (The video itself has long since been deleted from YouTube.)

In an amusingly unstructured piece of blocking, Fred sits down, obviously intending to put Lilli over his knee, only to find that there isn’t room, so he has to bend her over the table instead!

43: This is from Whittier High School in California, with a rather nice raised skirt that puts it clearly in this century rather than the last. It was posted on social media as a ‘throwback’ item; I have no idea in which year they did KMK.

And after the spanking: the unsittable bottom!

44: A production by Mount Vernon Musical Theater with no date attached, nor any indication which Mount Vernon it might be:

There was a production in Mount Vernon, Iowa, in 2005, by Mount Vernon Lisbon Community Theatre, but this doesn’t appear to be the same company.

45: a street-clothes rehearsal:

And with those stragglers rounded up, that really does bring our long-running series on Kiss Me Kate to an end!

Note: Nevertheless, I’m going to try and keep the years updated by adding new finds as they are made. This work has been going on quietly since the series started, so if you haven’t been to a particular year since it was first published, you may often find something there now that wasn’t there last time you looked. Less happily, you may also find that some videos on third-party sites have expired; I’ll also try and replace those with selected stills, where possible and appropriate. As I said before, you can start  the series from the beginning here, and you can go directly to any year from the Plays Index.

Smack, Smack! Who’s There?

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There was a certain quickening of pulses back in the 1990s when gossip emerged that the luminous actress and model Elizabeth Hurley enjoyed playing a certain parlor game with her Los Angeles peer-group of expatriate Brits. One player would bend over, blindfolded, while the others took it in turns to smack her bottom, and her objective each time was to guess the identity of the smacker. This press photo of a game in progress poses its own identity conundrum: is it Miss Hurley inside the jeans, or not?

This wasn’t some strange invention of late 20th-century kinksters. It was a popular pastime in France, Germany and England since at least the 14th century, when it appeared in decorative carving on a writing tablet now in the Louvre:

In the middle of the 17th century, it featured in paintings by Hieronymus Janssens (1624-93)

and Gerrit Lundens (1622-?).

In France, it was known as ‘la Main Chaude’ (the Hot Hand), in Germany the wholly literal ‘Schinkenklopfen‘ (ham-slapping),

while its English name was the altogether odder ‘Hot Cockles’.

It continued to be played into at least Regency (or, in France, Empire) times,

though this painting by Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot (1784-1845) seems to be a period piece rather than contemporary realism:

Ditto this one by Ferdinand Roybet (1840-1920):

Ditto again this illustration from a 19th-century book on the peculiar pastimes of past times:

And this 1900 advertising illustration by Maurice Leloir (1853-1940) puts the girls into the fashions of the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715):

But it’s still played nowadays, with suitably sparser clothing and the prospect of YouTube fame at the end of the game. At least, that’s what you can expect if you play as part of Mexico’s Team Fodongas:


The name translates loosely as the Lazy Girls, or perhaps the Dirty Girls. As you can see, there are nine of them, and whenever a smacker was correctly identified, she was the next to cover her eyes and bend over. The whole game went on for 18 rounds before each of them had been smacked – after which there was a nice little bonus and an extra round.

It follows that some of the girls were better at guessing than others, and several were identified more often. So let’s meet them individually, in ascending order of how sore their bottoms were afterwards:

First up is Yanet, who only got one smack in the whole game.

Maria got two,

and Karime got three.

I didn’t manage to catch the next girl’s name, but she got four smacks.

Yaren presented the video, and got nine smacks.

It was ten smacks for Luzy,

and eleven for Eli.

A run of bad guesses secured second place for Lesley, with fifteen smacks.

But the clear winner, with fully nineteen smacks, was Lugo.

She also endured the longest individual round, with 12 smacks before she got the right answer, though she wasn’t the only one to complain of a seriously smarting seat.

After Round 18, Yaren was the final smacker to have her identity guessed. She got her reward from Lugo, and it was … a spanking!

And also a starring role in Round 19, after which the game drew to a close.

To see all nine girls and all 75 smacks, plus the spanking, go here.

Censored!

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Pantera Bionda, the blonde panther, was a jungle heroine whose adventures with her American boyfriend Fred Taylor in the wilds of Borneo ran for two years from 1948 and concurrently entertained and scandalized Italians, depending on their political and social outlook. You can see the gradual encroachment of conservative morality in the development of what the heroine wears. She starts out in an abbreviated junglekini:

After a few issues, those Pantera panties were swapped for something just as revealing, but not quite so figure-hugging:

But later in the series, a greater modesty crept in:

And then the forces of darkness that were the Italian police and the Catholic church finally prevailed when Pantera Bionda, despite its popularity, was forced to discontinue publication after 108 issues.

The strip was subsequently reissued outside Italy; the available one, from which we’re going to see some panels, is the Dutch reprint of 1953, which is effectively a straight translation. But some versions went further, and the Brazilian edition in particular had few of the hangups that progressively curtailed the Italian original:

That’s quite a contrast to what happened in 1949 when Pantera Rubia made her debut in the only fascist state in Europe to outlast the Second World War, General Franco’s Spain: the panels and covers were systematically redrawn to put clothes on the characters, both male and female.

What had been remarkably revealing was now unobjectionably chaste,

and where the Italian artist had still managed to sneak a few curves in, these had gone west in Spain:

Most of the images are otherwise close copies of what had appeared in Italy, but there were a few moments that were evidently deemed completely beyond the pale, generally involving bodily contact between male and female characters.

And one of these enlivened the strip first published in the Italian issue #20 (October 2, 1948), but was entirely expunged from the Spanish issue #17 (August 15, 1950):

It’s a story primarily about fighting pirates at sea off Java, but at the relevant moment Pantera and Fred find themselves temporarily on an island, trying to get out of a deep ravine. They have a silly disagreement about which of them should go up the rope first, and she says it would be unwise to leave a frivolous young man alone down there. This doesn’t go down all that well with Fred:

I’ll teach you to be so cheeky! Nobody’s watching here!

And that didn’t go down all that well in Spain, where the equivalent panel was:

Nobody can see us here; I’ll teach you to be obedient!

She climbs up as ordered, but then, as a prank, pulls up the rope and strands him at the bottom: ‘That’s what you get for your insolence,’ she calls down. And he says that when he gets out, he’ll repeat it – a hundred times over. Her response:

First I’ll swap my leopard skin for hippo skin! But I’ll help you get to the top if you accept my terms!

In Spain, not only is the first sentence omitted, but the position of her hand is changed to remove the suggestion that she’s rubbing her smacked bottom:

I’ll help you out of there if you accept my conditions!

Obliged to say that he accepts without knowing precisely what he’s agreeing to, he makes a mental reservation that this is the last straw, and when he’s out of the ravine there’s a brief argument, followed by the threatened escalation from smacking to spanking:

Impudent girl! I’ll teach you…

– You mean devil! I should have left you in the ravine!
– It’s what you deserve!

Whereas in Spain:

You’re impertinent! I’ll give you a lesson!

– You brute! My ear still hurts! I should have left you down there!
– I did justice!

And what’s more, he says, she’ll end up back at the bottom of the ravine herself if she doesn’t beg his pardon for her bad behavior. When an apology is not immediately forthcoming:

– You want some more?
– Let me go! I ask forgiveness!
– That’s better!

– Must I start again?
– No, no, leave me, I’m sorry!
– That’s much better!

Much better? I really don’t think so!