I’m a fan of the work of
Sheldon Mayer. Though not all that well known today, Sheldon is the man who pulled Superman from a stack of submittals and got him placed in Action #1. He went on to be involved in the creation and editing of much of the All-American Comics (later DC) line-up including Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, and the Justice Society of America. He is generally considered to be one of the best Editors DC ever had; he had the gift of storytelling and he had the ability to teach others how to do it in a medium that was new and different.
When he stepped down as an editor, he continued as a writer and artist on a variety of DC humor books including
Sugar and Spike. He worked on S&S until his eyesight failed ending the series with issue 98. Later, he received cataract surgery and with restored vision resumed working. He produced new S&S stories for the overseas market. Many of those stories have never been reprinted in the US. He also contributed to mainline DC line by creating
The Black Orchid.
S&S is his best-known creative work. S&S lasted 98 issues before his eyesight failed him and he had to stop drawing it. Later cateract surgery corrected his eyesight and allowed him to continue S&S stories for non-US markets.
I recently was gifted a number of preliminary pieces related to
Sugar and Spike 83. Here we see two preliminary cover ideas.
In the one on the left (I hesitate to say first), we see a layout that is very true to the final cover in that all of the characters are depicted and it's clear that the the burglar is addressing the safecracker.
In the middle, we've lost the safecracker and one doesn't know to whom the speech bubble is addressed. Did Sheldon misjudge the scale? Is this very finished prelim actually the first one and he realized the issue with the bubble and did the left one next? We may never know.
In any case, the final cover is pretty clever and we now know that the Maid of Might had not yet appeared Earth-S&S! This issue is from 1969 and Supergirl was revealed on Earth-1 in Action Comics #285, dated February 1962.
