In this feature, "Things That Turned Out Bad," I will spotlight plotlines by writers that probably weren't a good idea at the time and have only become more problematic in retrospect. I'll try to stick with stuff that's more on the ill-conceived side of things than flat-out offensive (like generic racist stereotypes of characters during the 1940s), but some of these definitely edge into just flat-out offensive territory.

Today, inspired by my pal Josh Bayer sharing one of the pages on Facebook, I'm looking at a sketchy John Stanley solo Tom story from 1948's Our Gang With Tom and Jerry #45 from Dell Comics.

I think that it is probably fair to say that now, even in 2021, we have a bit of a problem with with the idea of the forced kiss. It's not NEARLY as bad as it once was, as people will generally look askance at a TV show or movie that tries this trope, but we're not all the way back from it (and honestly, often it seems like it is just "addressed" by reversing the genders in the trope and having a woman force a kiss on a guy). The idea of someone not wanting to be kissed but allowing the other person to kiss them anyways still shows up occasionally.

In the past, though, it was a BIG part of popular culture. In an excellent piece about kissing in popular culture, Katrina Gulliver spoke about the importance a specific photograph had on our views of forced kissing...

In 1942, Life magazine even offered a guide to kissing for actors on stage (something of a niche topic for a general readership magazine), which was surely also a guide for teens on how not to look like a klutz (“juvenile”) or a slut (“sprawling” on the sofa) in a romantic moment.

The description of “How to Kiss Correctly” makes it very clear there are ways to do it wrong—and their wrongness relates entirely to appearance, not the comfort or desire of the two people involved.

But Life didn’t offer tips on how to do the expert-level photographic kiss: the dip. The most famous of these is probably the V-J Day photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. The dip symbolizes male dominance and female submission, but also incorporates a technique of popular dance styles of the 1930s and ’40s (balancing the weight of an adult human requires practice). More importantly, it is an image for an audience. The pose is a display. That exuberant sailor could hardly have known he was creating one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But he was doing something dramatic, a grand public gesture. Kissing a stranger he’d caught off guard, and in so doing showing that this wasn’t just a Hollywood thing: Real people in the street actually kissed like that.

It’s a show of male strength and dominance, perfectly suited to midcentury ideals of masculinity.

Obviously, we cut the guy some slack for being a sailor celebrating the end of World War II, but it's that same strange idea that popular culture teaches us, that it is sometimes okay to force a kiss on a woman.

Similarly, you don't need me to tell you that we also used to have a strange take on spanking in popular culture, as well.

Heck, in the 1941 film, Our Wife (about a woman trying to woo her ex-husband back from his new fiancee when he strikes rich), the literal movie poster is a spanking!!

One of the greatest comic book creators of all-time is John Stanley, a writer and artist who worked as a freelance cartoonist for Western Publishing in the 1940s through the early 1960s and when Western stopped publishing their comics through Dell (forming their own company, Gold Key, instead), Stanley was one of the few creators who stuck with Dell and worked on more humor comics for them and whatever else they could find for him throughout the 1960s.

As brilliant as Stanley was, he was very much "of his time" with his work, so boy, were there ever a lot of spankings in his comics. Here's a Nancy comic where a rich kid's robot assistant turns on him, much to Nancy's delight...

That Nancy comic was actually from the late 1950s, but suffice it to say that it was common in Stanley's work throughout the years.

This, then, leads us to a Tom the Cat solo story by Stanley in 1948's Our Gang With Tom and Jerry. When Stanley began working on the regular Little Lulu series (his most iconic work. I'll be writing about his Little Lulu work soon. It's amazing), he started to "only" write and do very basic layouts, but during the late 1940s, he was drawing more.

The setup of the story is that Tom's love interest, Toots, is having a birthday and Tom can't buy her anything of note, so he decides to offer himself up as a slave. The whole turban motif, of course, is culturally insensitive, as well, but, well, it IS 1948...

Toots and her other beau, Bob Cat, take advantage of Tom's offer by having Tom clean Toots' house while she is off having a ball with Bob (who bought her a giant diamond). When they return, Toots has more assignments for Tom, but he quits. Bob and Toots remind him that he agreed to be her slave for the day and they're just holding him to his offer. So Tom agrees to stay and try to make them something to eat, but when Bob goes to tell him to hurry up, Tom snaps and assaults Bob...

The now snapped Tom goes up to Toots, asks her how old she is (unlikely she's 17 in cat years, right? And yet she sure doesn't seem to be 17 in human years either, so it's a weird bit) and then spanks her seventeen times and then gives her a forceful kiss...

Toots, of course, is super into it and Tom leaves triumphantly, having dominated his rival and his love interest.

So, yeah, that was the sort of thing that our popular culture was pushing back then.

Thanks for the indirect suggestion, Josh! And thanks to Frank Young of the amazing Stanley Stories website for the scans!

If anyone has a suggestion for a future edition of Things That Turned Out bad, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!