Working on classic comic fantasies Topper and Harvey for the urban fantasy class, I’m struck how central the notion of naughtiness and sin are to both of them.  I often use the following quotation when I teach the wonderful Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, but I think Thorne Smith and Mary Chase would agree:

It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is certain that we all think too much of sin … To make our ideal of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.  If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure.  If we cannot drive it from our minds—one thing of two:  either our creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right, we are criminal lunatics and should put our persons in restraint.  Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.  And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither the one nor the other.

… If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong.  I do not say “give them up,� for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

—from Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains