Perhaps no punishment became more associated with British comics than the slipper.
Dennis the Menace and Roger the Dodger were particularly well known for being pursued or punished by their fathers. Minnie the Minx and Beryl the Peril could receive similar treatment, something several readers remembered because comic-book discipline was by no means restricted entirely to boys.
What is particularly interesting is the way these scenes were presented.
They were not generally drawn as realistic studies of punishment. They were exaggerated slapstick. The slipper might be enormous, the culprit might leap into the air, and the following week everybody was back to normal.
The characters themselves rarely seemed permanently troubled by their fate. Indeed, the punishment was frequently no more realistic than the explosions, collisions and impossible accidents that filled the surrounding pages.
That exaggeration was essential to the humour.
The child reader was not necessarily laughing at somebody being hurt. The joke was usually that a character who had spent the entire story creating mayhem had finally been caught.
It was comic-book justice.
