18 October 2021

Sugar & Spike by Sheldon Mayer (No. 78)

Sugar & Spike (1951-1992)
by Sheldon Mayer

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Sugar & Spike is surely the happiest accident of all the Top 100 selections. Published by a mainstream comic book company at the nadir of its creative output - the early 1950s - and a decided attempt to capitalise on the runaway success of Hank Ketcham's Dennis The Menace, Sugar & Spike nonetheless managed a kind of grace and good humour denied creations with more auspicious beginnings.

The difference was creator Sheldon Mayer, one of the prime movers of the early days of comic books. The man who pressed National Comics to buy the Superman proposal, and one of the comics' earliest editors, Mayer as a writer/artist was more eclectic. In the 1940s his most prominent creative outlet was Scribbly, which combined a gentle, humorous take on spandex heroics with a healthy dose of autobiography and outright sentiment - the forerunner of several reworking of the superhero genre to fit more personal themes. On this list, Mayer represents any number of talented men and women who only rarely broke through the stringent and specific commercial restrictions of comic book publishing.

Sugar & Spike works because it marries a great concept to a specific strength of the medium. Mayer's major nod to Ketcham was through his process: he watched films of his own children as inspiration for the proposed feature. What he noted was a period of non-verbal communication between his son and daughter, and that "baby talk" - a language only they and their same-age peers could understand - was the hallmark of the strip. In that device, and in structuring most adventures around the discovery of the wider world, Mayer linked the special world his creations enjoyed to the space young comics readers create around themselves reading comic books. Mayer was more than clever and talented enough to provide a graceful, funny follow-through with increasingly creative adventures for his pair. Modest, charming and accessible, Sugar & Spike may be the perfectly realised American mainstream comic book series.


FURTHER READING:



No comments:

Post a Comment