One of my favorite comic book creators of all time was a man named Sheldon Mayer. He was a cartoonist who got into comic books about the time comic books started getting onto newsstands. At some point, he found himself on the editorial end of the business when he might have preferred to spend 100% of his time — instead of maybe half — at a drawing board, writing and drawing cartoony things.
(And I can't mention him without mentioning this: He did good at the editorial end of the field, especially when he helped turn an unsold comic strip by two kids named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster into perhaps the hottest comic book property the industry has ever known. Hint: It was the comic about the guy with the big red "S" on his chest.)
In the early forties, he was the editor at a firm called All-American Comics which birthed, under his supervision, characters like Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern. In 1944, All-American, its properties and staff were absorbed by DC Comics and Mayer became an editor for DC, though he made time to do as much cartooning as he could. By 1948 though, he basically decided that the cartooning was good for his health and the editing was not so he gave up the latter. He spent the rest of his life on the DC Comics payroll and among the things he did to earn that salary were comics like The Three Mouseketeers and Sugar & Spike.
Sugar & Spike was his best, longest-enduring creation. The comic book appeared on American newsstands from 1956 until 1971, ending partly due to low sales but mainly due to vision problems that Mayer was experiencing. He then did some work writing for DC's non-funny comics for a while until cataract surgery enabled him to return to the drawing board. Back where he belonged, he produced more Sugar & Spike material. Certain foreign publishers had been buying and reprinting (and reprinting and reprinting) Mayer's older stories and were delighted to be able to purchase and print new stories. Mayer produced them as long as he could and finally passed away in 1991.
In 1977, a fellow I knew through the mail, Jay Zilber, published what I believe was the one and only issue of a fanzine called Glx Sptzl Glaah devoted to Mayer's work. The characters of Sugar and Spike were babies and they sometimes spoke so we could understand them and sometimes spoke in a language known only to infants. "Glx sptzl glaah" meant something in that language but, not having been an infant except, sometimes, emotionally for about 73 years, I can't tell you what it means. It made a great fanzine title though.
I drew the cover and wrote an article for it. At the recently-concluded Comic-Con International in San Diego, I spent some time in a booth signing copies of this thing and someone brought me a fragile but whole copy of Glx Sptzl Glaah to autograph.
I have a copy or two of it — or at least, I'm pretty sure I have a copy of it. Exactly where it might be in my home is a darn good question…one I hope to answer some day. That moment at Comic-Con was the first time I'd held a copy in…oh, about 46 years. If and when I find my copy, I hope I find with it a letter I received because of that cover. It was typed (poorly) on yellow paper and it was from Sheldon Mayer.
He thanked me for what I'd written and told me something that I hope was not just one of those things you say to be nice. He said he'd always cringed and felt uneasy when he saw someone else drawing Sugar and Spike. My cover was the first he'd ever seen that didn't induce such a cringe. In a way, that didn't flatter me as much as it might have because I didn't think of what I'd produced as a drawing. To me, it was a forgery, carefully copying — almost tracing — pieces of different Mayer drawings to create a replica. If I'd drawn his characters without doing that, I'm sure he'd have cringed aplenty.
A year or three later, I received a call from Nelson Bridwell, who was an editorial assistant — or somesuch title — at DC. He told me that Mr. Mayer had retired once and for all from producing those new Sugar & Spike stories. The topic had come up of maybe having someone else continue producing them and Mayer had said something like, "I'd rather you didn't but if you have to, get that guy who drew that fanzine cover."
Nelson was not calling to offer me that job. No decision had been made to continue the series with me or anyone. He just wanted me to know that if they did and if I was going to do them, he hoped he could write some of them. I told him there was no earthly way I could draw a comic book like that. "It was one drawing," I explained. "It was more like a magic trick…like me making you think I could have you pick a card, look at it, put it back in the deck and then I'd read your mind and tell you what card it was. I can draw like Sheldon Mayer the same way I can read minds."
Nelson understood. And I don't think it was because of that call that I never heard anything from DC about me doing any Sugar & Spike stories. I think they just realized that having anyone do that was a bad idea.
The gent who brought me the fanzine to sign at the con said, "I didn't know you could draw." Well, maybe that's because I can't. Not the way a real artist can draw and these days, I don't even forge. I've written here before about why I don't and why I can't and why it doesn't bother me. But I have a couple of stories to tell about that lost ability and I'll tell one or more of them here in the next few days.
