ADVENTURE STRIPS: THE PHANTOM
Lee Falk's The Phantom is said to be the first costumed hero to appear in comic strip form, a masked adventurer patterned after Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Originally conceived in 1936, the title character has changed very little during the intervening seven decades. Despite the purple tights and domino mask, The Phantom was depicted as the stereotype male of the interwar period - tall dark and ruggedly handsome, a man of few words who never failed to deliver the goods, no matter how extreme the circumstances. Armed with a pair of semi-automatics and his unerring sense of justice, Kit Walker blazed a trail across the dark continent, subduing smugglers, pirates, slave-traders and similar undesirables. Kit normally dealt with his enemies with a devistating right hook; but what could he do with the femme fatales he occasionally met up with? Being a true gentleman, he couldn't use his iron fists on a woman, no matter how much she might deserve it.
The example reproduced below provides the answer. In this early episode, The Phantom runs afoul of Queen Pera, the beautiful young ruler of a lost African Kingom (probably based on Rider Haggard's She). Cruel, spiteful, and rather vindictive, Pera is nothing more than a malicious child playing house with her subject's lives. In real life, a coup d'etat normally requires the absolute removal (ie execution) of the offending despot, but such crude methods were out of the question for our intrepid hero. The solution was deceptively simple: seating himself squarely on the thone, Kit turned the spoilt little tyrant over his knee and paddled her royal bottom - right in front of her entire court ("Hey - you can't do that to the Queen!"). Readers of the era would have found the scene both comical and gratifying. At the end of the day, the brattish young princess was only getting what she deserved, and Kit Walker was precisely the man to give it to her.
Primitive though the artwork was, the sequence offered some interesting symbolism, such as the crown toppling from Pera's head as the Phantom stretches her across his lap (a motif Falk would use again in later episodes). Moreover, the scenario contains all the basic elements of a classic spanking. Pera's discipline is embarrassingly public, reinforcing her juvenile status. Her sleek, rounded bottom is presented to the court in anticipation of the main event, the cheeks outlined by a layer of clinging silk. In the climactic third panel, the haughty African Empress kicks her feet in pain - a sure sign of a satisfyingly thorough spanking.
A closer examination reveals some unlikely but fascinating details. Pera's gossamer robe looks suspiciously like a contemporary evening gown, while her waist is so tiny that a man could practically encircle it with one hand. Her jewellery suggests the wealth and affluence commonly associated with desirable women. She wears seamed stockings (and high heels!), despite the centuries-long isolation of her jungle stronghold. Perhaps the most telling factor is that Pera is blond - not just rich young, and pretty, but a platinum blond straight out of a Jean Harlow romantic comedy. Even back in the thirties, blonds were considered infinitely more spankworthy than brunettes, which made Pera a prime candidate for a hot bottom.
While spanking had been a recurrent device in newspaper strips, this was the first of its kind to appear in a costumed hero series. Falk's early experiment would set the standard for many subsequent images. Within a few years, the new medium of the comic book would gain increasing popularity, leading to a plethora of titles and genres; from superheroes to saddle operas to 'true crime' fiction. All of them would feature spanking imagery at one time or another. And each of them, to varying degrees, would trace their descent from this modest newsprint effort, in which a stern, intractible male taught a spoilt little girl a most valuable lesson.
So far as I know, Queen Pera never resurfaced after her first memorable appearance, but we may safely assume that her few thousand acts of torture and oppression were forgiven.
After all, she'd had her bottom well and truly smacked by none other than The Ghost Who Walks.
