Customer Reviews

Sugar and Spike Archives Vol. 1 (Archive Editions)

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DC Comics have finally collected the first ten issues of this delightful comic in a beautiful hardcover. These stories are almost sixty years old and they are just as funny and charming now as they were 1953. While Sugar and Spike may not be the best drawn or best written comic, the art and story combine to make a truly charming classic. Personally I have never read a story with Sugar and Spike that did not bring a smile to my face or make me laugh out loud. The premise is two toddlers who cannot yet speak, except in their own "baby" language. These stories explain the world from their point of view, which is both insightful and very entertaining. As a bonus the comics (well reprints) include the paper doll designs that readers sent in back in the early 1950s. As dark as many of today's comics tend to be, Sugar and Spike is a bright ray of sunshine. This is a must for anyone's holiday gift list, even if you are giving it to yourself. Now if only (PLEASE!) DC would collect all the Sugar and Spike stories that have never before been printed in the United States. For a number of years after DC ended the book, Sheldon Meyer continued to do Sugar and Spike stories for other markets. These never-before-reprinted stories would make a perfect Showcase collection.

At long last, the adventures of pint-size protagonists Sugar Plumm and Cecil 'Spike' Wilson make it into the DC Archives series. The brainstorm of Sheldon Mayer, cartoonist, writer, editor, and creator of all things comics, 'Sugar and Spike' ran for an unprecedented fifteen years, and 98 issues, from 1956- 1971. After leaving DC, Mayer picked it up again for foreign publishers from 1978- 1983. This volume, which collects the first ten issues, is labeled Volume One, so cross your fingers and hope for more.

Wildly popular over three decades, Sugar and Spike has been unavailable except in digest size and as DC Silver Age reprints of a few issues. The DC Archives series books seem expensive (and they are), but Amazon at least drags them into gift range. Why a book printed in China needs to cost so much I don't know, but there's no denying the quality of this 10.5 X 7 inch hardback. About 260 pages of full color comics on slick, quality paper. Very archival. Except for the ads, you get the original comic books, including the covers, which often carried a mini comic strip as an ad for the series, along with Mayer's innovative extras, like "Pint-Size Pin Ups". These were cut out paper dolls and clothes. Fitting, since Sugar often called Spike "Doll Boy". On the "Do It Yourself Comic Page" Mayer encouraged young readers to trace or draw expressions on the characters, and sign their name at the bottom. This at a time when few artists were allowed to sign their comics. In "You Be the Editor" readers were encouraged to wear another of Mayer's hats, and put comic panels in order.

Each story ended with the adventuresome duo sitting in the corner as the sentence for their wild antics. The second issue introduces Sugar's Uncle Charley, who is always in the kids' corner, and sometimes literally so, as he shares their fate. There's also a supporting comic called "Little Snoopy", which quickly drops out of sight, and seems somewhat patterned after Mayer's earlier character, Scribbly, from the funny pages. Mayer wrote and/or drew numerous comics and characters, from the '40s through the '80s, notably "The Three Mouseketeers" from 1956 on, and in 1975, "The Bible", a short run of stories from Genesis for DC, illustrated by Joe Kubert The Bible. The editors of the Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics included three Sugar and Spike stories and seven pages of Scribbly comics, attesting to Mayer's continuing legacy. At last in archival form, these truly are comics for the kid in all of us.

Every so often, I make a "Why Not?" purchase at the comics store, based on both curiosity and some faint inkling as to the nature of the item being considered. This is my latest such buy, and one of my very best, I'd say. Apparently, some DC fans who've been waiting impatiently for the company to get around to reprinting Sheldon Mayer's fanciful series starring a pair of simpatico toddlers are quite miffed that DC decided to do so in the pricey "Archive" format. I can certainly sympathize, but I didn't recoil at the price tag. From what little I knew about SUGAR AND SPIKE, I was fairly sure that I was going to like it. I just didn't realize how truly enjoyable it would be.

Like PEANUTS, LITTLE LULU, and DENNIS THE MENACE, SUGAR AND SPIKE is a deceptively simple "kids' strip" in a deceptively benign setting. Little Sugar Plumm and Cecil "Spike" Wilson, like the kids in PEANUTS, appear to be eloquent beyond their years, but there's a catch; the "baby talk" in which they converse, helpfully translated for us by Mayer, is essentially a private language, one which turns out to be shared by babies of all sorts and species. This is a clever mingling of the real and fantasy worlds on a par with Charles Schulz' creation of the Snoopy-centered "parallel universe" in PEANUTS, with the difference being that the kids themselves fashion the fantasy element. This gives such mundane "adventures" as taking a trip to Grandma's or the zoo, or learning how light switches and mirrors "work," an extra dollop of intrigue. Mayer also starts out in the PEANUTS mode, or somewhere near there, by only showing the kids' well-meaning but (from the kids' perspective, anyway) clueless parents from the waist down and never showing their faces, but he soon changes that policy, which I think was a wise move. Trying to manufacture stories starring toddlers without getting the parents "completely" involved on occasion would have been far too confining a creative format.

SUGAR AND SPIKE has been described, not inaccurately, as a 1950s version of Rugrats -- to which I would quickly add, "with much better artwork." Actually, this last is anything but a minor point, as anyone familiar with Mayer's earlier artwork for such features as SCRIBBLY would agree. Mayer's style on SCRIBBLY -- and the backup feature LITTUL (sic) SNOONY in SUGAR AND SPIKE #1 (April-May 1956), which would never appear again (how did DC get around those persnickety postal regulations, I wonder?) -- could best be described as "Rough and Ready Urban," full of lumpy, rough-edged-yet-lovable denizens of the lower middle class. To be honest, it is unlikely that such a 1940s-esque style would have sustained SUGAR AND SPIKE if it had been used for the adventures of the suburbanite title characters. Instead, from the very beginning, Mayer's work on SUGAR AND SPIKE is slick and stylized. The kids start out a bit on the tall side before assuming the squat fireplug shape that they would keep for the duration of the series (and which Mayer undoubtedly found easier to draw and work into scenes).

In terms of scripting, I don't think that Mayer's imagination fully kicks in until the later stories in this volume (which reprints the contents of SUGAR AND SPIKE #1-#10). Early in the game, Mayer apparently got a lot of ideas from his own young children; in this respect, he was the exact opposite of John Stanley, who insisted that his kids gave him no story ideas of any kind for LITTLE LULU. The result of this, though, is that many of the early S&S stories, while funny enough, hew pretty closely to the "cute kids getting into innocuous trouble" template. As Mayer becomes more comfortable with the characters, however, some of the more charming aspects of Sugar and Spike's "child logic" come to the fore. Thus, Sugar describes the appearance of the kids in a mirror by exclaiming, "There's again of us!", and the duo figure that there's lots of sand on the beach because, like the sand in the kids' sandboxes, it must have followed its "owners" there. I expect that we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the stories to come.

I don't think that one can overemphasize the importance of the creator-fan connection in explaining how this title managed to brave all the vagaries of the Silver Age and last until 1971. (Even then, SUGAR AND SPIKE was only cancelled because Mayer, who insisted on doing all of the stories himself, was having severe eye trouble.) In the 1950s and early 1960s, at a company like DC, taking such initiatives as giving readers credit for story ideas and allowing them to design wardrobes for the kids was legitimately meaningful. I've little doubt that Mayer's long and distinguished career as a DC editor and talent-groomer was the main reason for him being given the privilege of signing his work; for Mayer to "give back" in the way that he did is a credit to him.

I'll definitely be on board for as long as this particular series lasts -- and, if you like high-quality humor comics, then I'd suggest that you clamber on as well.