Willie Garvin and Modesty Blaise. Characters are © Beaverbrook Newspapers Ltd.
We remember seeing Modesty Blaise (1963 - 2002) in the Menominee Falls Gazette after that publication merged with The Comics Reader in 1979, although we don't think we paid that much attention to it. If not for reading TCR, we doubt we would have encountered the strip anywhere else, for it was a British import that strangely never enjoyed widespread distribution in the U.S. (As we have mentioned before, distribution has always been the biggest problem you face if you're in the comics business, and certainly getting your book into the stores or your strip into the newspapers today is next to impossible as we can testify from personal experience). What the problem was with MB we don't know - two explanations were the length of the stories of writer Peter O'Donnell and Modesty's immodest habit of showing up topless, often to distract the bad guy (it worked!). She should have been spanked for flashing that way, which brings us to this work of Tim's.
Willie Garvin(?) spanks Modesty Blaise. Characters are © Beaverbrook Newspapers Ltd. Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/22/2019 (Click to increase in size).
Modesty isn't topless here, but her modesty has been violated as she has been rendered
bottomless, the better to spank her 
. Our
long-time friend and benefactor, Michael, who has been responsible over the years
for providing CSR with Tim's artwork, didn't specifically mention the identity of
her spanker. It could be her long-time sidekick Willie Garvin, as we have assumed, or
it could be an antagonist for her dreamed up by Tim. Nice conception and execution by
him in either case. This one was done at about the same time as his
Alley Oop Spanks Ooola - Bottom
Marks in History which we posted back in 2014 (have we really been holding on to
this for that long?).
Michael comments:
"Modesty Blaise has an unusual way of upholding her man's right to chastise her when he chooses to do so...I'm pretty sure there was nothing [i.e. no spankings - Web-Ed] in Modesty Blaise (though there was a somewhat coy scene in the artist's previous strip Romeo Brown."So no known actual spankings for Modesty in her strip, which isn't that surprising since as we've observed before it was very rare for a comics heroine to be spanked in her own strip (Brenda Starr being perhaps the most obvious exception). This is her first spanking here at CSR, although D.M Sherwood at least mentions spanking Modesty (or a close substitute) in this post.
Thanks as always to Tim for drawing this and Michael for sending it in.
