Volume 34, Number 4

Vol. 34, No. 4
April 2023
whole number 400
2023 pages 025-033 (8 pages)

Great issue for the landmark 400th, with a focus on Sheldon Mayer in his birthday month.  Up front is an unpublished single page Sugar & Spike comic from circa 1960 that even I had never seen before (and I have a list of some 300 pages of unpublished S&S material by Mayer).

Inside is a sample daily strip of Mayer's circa 1980 comic strip proposal for Sugar & Spike and four pages of an unfinished Rudolph the Reindeer story "Easter Parade", from the late 1970s and inked by Tenny Henson. The backcover goes back to 1949 for a look at the cover of SCRIBBLY #5, with a classic Mayer gag.

Also this issue, RS notes the passing of Neal Adams in 2022 with some words on his work and influence.

Volume 11, Number 12

Vol. 11, No. 12
December 2000
whole number 132

2000 pages 093-098

One of the regular traditions of the newsletter is the December issue, closing out each volume, contains some work by Sheldon Mayer. That's been the case with every December issue I have access to since Volume 5, it might have started before that. 

It probably helps that two of the unpublished Mayer projects that Snyder has access to are a Rudolph the Reindeer story and the layouts to a second bible adaptation about the life of Jesus (to be finished by Nestor Redondo, like the published first Old Testament volume was). And Sugar & Spike had a lot of holiday themed stories as well.

 

This time the focus is on the unrealized THE SUGAR AND SPIKE POCKET TREASURY Mayer was working on in 1971, with a table of contents, a sample page (modified from the original publication, so a 4-page story would be a 9-page story in the reprint) and a proposed cover. There are also a few 1971 letters from Mayer to production chief Jack Adler and publisher Carmine Infantino about the project (the type of colouring he wants and the cover layout) and a short then-recent note from Infantino about shelving the book. A shame, Mayer was very much ahead of his time in terms of packaging reprints of comics.