Sheldon Mayer

§ December 31st, 2003 § Filed under Uncategorized Comments Off on Sheldon Mayer

I don’t buy very many back issues any more…given that I’ve been reading comics for (gack) 30 years, I already have most of the funnybooks from the last few decades in which I’d have any interest.

However, there are a few things I do keep an eye out for…I collect old fanzines (The Comic Reader in particular), the occasional inexpensive Archie or Superman-family related comic from the 50s and early 60s, The Fox and The Crow by Jim Davis (no, not that Jim Davis)…

…and anything that contains any work by Sheldon Mayer.

Given that it seems increasingly unlikely that we’ll see any extensive reprinting of Mayer’s work (despite the recent reissue of the first Sugar & Spike and the high hopes of the DC Archives page, as seen by the mock-ups here and here), I’ve been buying his work whenever I come across it. Sugar & Spike and, to a lesser extent, Three Mouseketeers (though he didn’t do all of these) are relatively easy to track down, finding some of his other work requires digging through the back-up stories in titles like The Dodo and The Frog or Nutsy Squirrel. I still haven’t come across any of his Scribbly material, though, aside from a reprint in A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics. Mayer’s work is always worth the search, and it’s a damn shame today’s kids won’t get exposed to it.

It’s even more of a damn shame that if today’s kids were exposed to Sugar & Spike, they’d think it was just a Rugrats rip-off.

Additional linkage:

There was a short Golden Age Red Tornado story by Mayer that appeared in Secret Origins #29 in the late 1980s.

An interview with Mayer’s daughter appeared in an issue of Comic Book Artist, which is online here, with lots of art by Mayer.

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