Jeg kan ikke mindes, at DC har genoptrykt nogen historier fra Sheldon Mayers klassiske børne-tegneserie “Sugar & Spike” siden de små pocket hæfter i 80’erne! Og den gang var jeg skeptisk. Tror ikke engang, jeg fik købt nogen. Men nu er jeg moden, elller måske rettere, umoden nok til at værdsætte denne serie. Tiden er i hvert fald moden. Tiden er altid moden til “Sugar & Spike”. Sheldon Mayer skrev og tegnede denne serie i mere end 30 år. “Sugar & Spike” er hans livsværk, og sikke et værk! Den blev et kæmpe hit for DC, og derfor er det så meget mere uforståeligt, ja, nærmest ubegribeligt, hvorfor i al verden de dog ikke tager og smider en Archives farve hc samling på markedet. Markedet er der, men DC har bare ikke opdaget det. Mon de har glemt “Sugar & Spike”?
fra http://hipsterdad.livejournal.com/535404.html
“Sugar and Spike” were a pair of babies who toddled around trying to make some sense of the incredibly bizarre world of grown-ups. They communicated in their own “baby talk” language with all infants, whether human or animal, and had oddball little adventures interacting with things they couldn’t quite explain. One of the hallmarks of the series, outside of the silly slapstick that drove the funny plots, was the strange wordplay. None of the babies, for example, knew the word “door,” but they knew it was a thing that would swing, and so doors would be referred to as “swingy things.”
A tremendously popular strip in its day, DC was glad to indulge its creator’s wishes and so Sugar and Spike was, unlike most kid-friendly trademarks, not merchandised very much, and no other artists ever worked on it. There was, briefly, a TV cartoon; it was a low-budget, limited-to-no animation offering which appeared as part of a program called Video Comics on Nickelodeon when I was in elementary school.
Apparently, Sheldon Mayer suffered from cataracts which made it increasingly impossible for him to draw the strip. With sales of this kind of material sagging in the early 70s anyway, DC shelved the book. After Mayer recovered from surgery, he resumed drawing it, but few of these were published in the US, but instead they showed up in various South American and European countries where the series was still quite popular. There are apparently about fifteen years’ worth of Sugar and Spike which few readers in the States have seen. In the early 1980s, some of these were used in a few issues of the digest-sized anthology Best of DC, sometimes in the company of Mayer’s teen-comedy Binky (an Archie knockoff) or Arnold Drake’s Stanley and His Monster, other fun sixties strips whose time, DC felt, had mostly passed.
