Having old comic books can serve as a doorway to old memories dating from childhood. You can’t get that from today’s magazines. Many comics nowadays are over-hyped, overly violent along with a generous dollop of overt sexuality. They are aimed at young adults rather than pre-adolescents as they often were when I was a child. Tied in with blockbuster movie franchises now, they are milked relentlessly for their money making capacities rather than fueling the fantasies of readers. Even the formerly innocuous Archie comics have developed a darker tone and the artwork has lost the charm of yesteryear, either the art looking amateurish or attempting to match the ‘realism’ of the major comics such as Marvel or DC. An advertisement splash for the Riverdale tv series on Netflix looks more like something for Children of The Corn, rather than the humorous teen-age hijinks of the fifties, sixties and seventies.
What a far cry from the bright, optimistic plotlines and artworks I can recall. Archie comics were always fun to read, not anything you needed worrying about getting nightmares from. Even DC and Marvel portrayed the heroes endlessly battling against villains and usually winning. If they didn’t win, all was not lost as you could count on a rematch between the good guys and the bad guys.
A favorite I can recall was an odd little comic series put out by DC comics, called Sugar and Spike.
Written and drawn by Sheldon Mayer, it depicted the antics of a pair of toddlers name Sugar Plum and Cecil ‘Spike’ Wilson. When adults listened to the tots, all they heard was ‘Glx’ or ‘Blox’. But when Sugar and Spike spoke to each other or to other babies (both human and animal) they were perfectly articulate, speaking a baby language all their own. Sheldon modeled their mischief making on the behavior of his own toddler children, creating a delightfully clever off-kilter comic which was successfully published for many years.
Sheldon Mayer is also responsible for Superman being the well-known icon he is today.
The story is that he came across Siegel and Shuster’s unsold Superman comic strip which delighted him enough, so he touted it towards his employer Max Gaines who finally took it up and got it published in the iconic Action #1 comic published in June 1938. The rest, naturally, is history.
Sheldon began illustrating Sugar and Spike in 1956 with the stipulation only he could write the stories and draw the mischievous toddlers, an arrangement that would never fly today in the present corporate environment. His quirky humor permeates the entire comic consistently throughout the series. He even signed his own artwork as can be seen in the corner of the lower right hand panel.
Other characters were added, as time went on. Bernie the Brain, an infant super-genius, was one, allowing the kids an opportunity to play with his wacky inventions (and get into all sorts of trouble naturally), or provide explanations about the baffling behavior of the adults in their world. Their creator was consistently able to maintain the lighthearted plots without any loss of quality.
Sheldon continued producing his comics until cataracts forced him to stop for a time. By the time he had surgery to correct the issue, and resumed drawing, the industry had changed. While he continued drawing Sugar and Spike until his passing in 1991, these issues were published overseas, with only a few of the stories being reprinted in the USA. Arrgh! What a loss!
No one has been able to successfully replicate Sheldon’s work on Sugar and Spike, a product of his unique creativity and sense of humor. DC comics has recently produced an version of Sugar and Spike, showing them all grown up and running a very peculiar detective agency which “handles problems and mysteries that the superheroes can’t handle themselves”. Needless to say, all the original charm is gone, smothered under a distasteful layer of cynical edgy scripting.
I’ve long since read my few copies of the original Sugar and Spike to pieces many decades ago, so will be keeping an eye out at flea markets and yard sales in the hopes of acquiring back issues at a cheap price. These little gems are well worth the getting.
Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving, or as Sugar and Spike would say; “Glyx, blox, snzx!”
