Fred Hovel was once the headmaster of an exclusive private prep school but was fired when it was decided that he was using excessive corporal punishment. His obsession with punishing rule-breakers led him to create the costumed persona of the Spanker, a pastiche of the Punisher equipped with his spanking paddles. He would paddle anyone whom he deemed deserving.
The Spanker was one of the mediocre super-villains gathered by Dr. Angst to form the Band of the Bland. Angst had gathered them as part of a plot to assassinate then-presidential candidate Howard the Duck. The Spanker and the rest believed that the reason for this attack was to raise their own profile, but in actuality Angst had been hired by an outside party to murder Howard. They were also tricked into believing that their powers had been enhanced by a mystical element called Promethium, which was actually a placebo administered by Angst. The Band of the Bland confronted Howard at Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum where Howard was helped by the Defenders. The Defenders defeated the Band and they were presumably sent to prison.
Years later, the Spanker was released from prison and had resumed his vendetta against all of those guilty of wrongdoing. Dr. Angst escaped from prison and approached the Spanker, as well as the rest of the Band, reorganizing them to carry out his latest plot. This scheme became known as the Cosmic Squish Principle and involved releasing a large amount of pocket universes into their own dimension, thereby destroying the universe as it currently was, and creating a new world which the Band of the Bland would be the masters of. The Band were defeated by a group consisting of Howard the Duck, the She-Hulk, Louise Mason, The Terror, the Critic and Brent Wilcox. The Spanker attacked Louise Mason, administering a stern spanking. Mason, formerly the golden age hero known as the Blonde Phantom, did not take kindly to this and knocked out the Spanker.