So what are a couple of transposed letters between Valentines?
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“Heres your TREAT”
From Sugar and Spike #37 (Oct-Nov 1961), art by Sheldon Mayer, dialogue by persons unknown:
I can’t help but admire the “swearing” in the penultimate panel.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
for more Sugar & Spike Halloween fun, go see my pals at The Comic Treadmill
One of these days, 142-year-old Nugget Pete is going to ego-surf his own name through Google and find this post.
So a couple of weeks ago I was talking about a Sugar and Spike story dedicated to “Nugget Pete,” a 90-something year old gent who’d been writing in and requesting an S&S story featuring Native Americans.
Well, longtime Ruinite C. Elam popped into the comments on that post to drop in a couple of message board links giving us a little more detail on Mr. N. Pete. Those message board entries were made only days after my own initial posting, so clearly the Nugget Pete zeitgeist was making its way across the comics nerdinet.
The first features a Sugar and Spike letter column containing what seems to be Nugget Pete’s first letter to the series, written back when Pete was but a strapping young lad of 87. And, sure enough, he’s asking for stories with Native Americans. “I suggest you put in something about cowboys and Indians – That never hurt a magazine yet.” …Words to live by!
The second link has another S&S letter column, this time from another fan (this one only 75 years old!) referring back to Nugget Pete’s letter and wondering if that was any inspiration for the grandpa/cowboy character Shelly Mayer introduced into the S&S strip. Mayer’s response, paraphrased: “yeah, probably.”
Anyway, that was a nice follow-up to what was (to me, anyway) an interesting tidbit of funnybook history. Thanks, C. Elam, for pointing that out to me!
And now, something from the Old DC.
So this is the week the Sugar and Spike Archives finally…finally…comes out, reprinting the first ten issues of this classic series by Sheldon Mayer. I would have preferred maybe something a little more…consumer-friendly, perhaps, but beggars can’t be choosers, really. And I’m sure there are economic concerns re: expected sales versus production costs versus cover prices that makes the hardcover Archives format the best perceived match for this material…not to mention the fact that the people most interested in this will be willing to dole out nearly any price for it.
Anyway, it’s here! it’s here! And since Sugar and Spike ran for under a hundred issues, at ten issues per volume, that’s only ten books! Get cracking, DC…oh, wait, there’s also the other S&S material Mayer produced for overseas markets, some of which was printed in the U.S. in DC’s digest format in the 1980s. So, yeah, we’ll need reprints of that, too, DC. THIS I COMMAND.
After you’re done with that, you can start on Mayer’s Scribbly. Yes, I’ll allow you do to so. No need to thank me.
Anyway, I was poking through my Sugar and Spike comics here in the Vast Mikester Comic Archives for a good image to illustrate this post, when I came across this panel in Sugar and Spike #48 (Aug-Sept 1963). Mayer often dedicated stories to specific readers, usually in the format of “this story is for [name], age [#], [city/state or country].” But sometimes there’d be some additional info, like so:
Now that makes the mind a’wander. Was this just a lonely old man who wrote letters to a comic book, hoping someday he’d see a response? Was he a huge fan of Sugar & Spike, and also of (admittedly stereotyped) Native Americans, that he absolutely had to see them put together in a story? Was he writing on behalf of a grandchild or great-grandchild, sending letters month after month inspired by that child’s brief whim, finally seeing success years after the child had forgotten s/he’d even desired such a thing? Did Mayer sift through the mailsack every few weeks, pulling out yet another letter from Nugget-Pete, rolling his eyes and thinking “boy, this guy again?” (Actually, I think you can probably infer that last bit from the tone of message beneath the panel.)
Regardless, I hope Nugget-Pete did get to see his story in print. I bet it was a thrill for Sugar & Spike fans of any age to see a story that was dedicated just to them.
…Oh, and while I’m thinking of it…DC, we need an Archive edition of Mayer’s “Dizzy Dog” strips, too. Get on that, would you?
