Sheldon Mayer: Prisoner of DC
by Jeet Heer
Friday, July 9, 2010
Back in the Comics Journal #126 (January 1989), R. Fiore wrote about a Plastic Man comic that made a nodding reference to Jack Cole. “It’s especially galling when Jack Cole is one of what I think of as the Prisoners of DC,” Fiore observed. “DC doesn’t think reprinting Cole’s Plastic Man, or Beck and Binder’s Captain Marvel or Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly would be profitable enough for them, but they’re unwilling to license them to other publishers for fear of hurting sales of cold crap like this.”
That was 21 years ago. The situation has since improved slightly, but not enough. DC has given us eight volumes of Plastic Man (alas in their hideous Archives format) and allowed Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd to do their Jack Cole book. There have also been books reprinting Captain Marvel (and I’m eagerly anticipating a Captain Marvel volume from Abrams that Chip Kidd is working on). And there were a few Mayer stories in the Spiegelman/Mouly Toon Treasury.
Of the three artists named by Fiore, Mayer has been the worst served by DC. He did thousands of pages of very entertaining kids comics, most notably Scribbly as well as Sugar and Spike. In an ideal world, the best of these comics would be reprinted in a format similar to the John Stanley Library D&Q put out. At the very least there should be a thick, 300-page Best of Sheldon Mayer, as rigorously edited as the Toon Treasury or Art In Time. If DC doesn’t want to do such a book, there are other publishers who would be happy to take up the task. Sheldon Mayer spent the vast majority of his life working for DC as a writer, artist and editor (he was actually at the company before Superman was first published). If the people at DC had any sense of obligation to the artists who created their company, they would give Mayer a “best of” volume. But as things stand, Mayer remains in death the most luckless of the “Prisoners of DC”: still trapped in a copyright prison with only the occasional, very brief release into the freedom of republication.
Labels: Sheldon Mayer
Beck is still ill-served, for the most part, thanks to DC’s insistence in reprinting the stuff in chronological order, so four hardcover volumes in and they still didn’t get to the good stuff. Small wonder they sputtered to a halt. And when they did do a “best of Shazam” book they filled over half of it with DC published stuff, I think there’s only one or two short stories I’d call prime Beck in there.
Is the Kidd book going to have any actual stories? The description I read made it sound like a collection of photos of toys and other merchandise.
And there definitely needs to be a collection of Mayer’s best. Wouldn’t trust DC to put it together, though. They’d probably fill half the book with non-Mayer stories about the robot Red Tornado or something.
Sheldon Mayer is an exceptional talent. All the humor work he did (everything I’ve seen anyhow) is a cut above pretty much anything else DC has published in their “horrible” archive format.
Scribbly, Sugar and Spike, or any of the other features Mayer wrote, penciled, and inked would very possibly sell better to people who don’t typically buy the archives.
An interesting thing about Sugar and Spike is the comics were so popular in Europe Mayer continued to produce stories which were published overseas long after the DC comic book had been canceled.
@mk anthony. Yeah, you’re right, as I’ve just found out, the Kidd Captain Marvel book will be devoted to merchandise. Which will be nice in and of itself (as Kidd’s other books in this line have been). But we still need a well-edited Best of Captain Marvel book.
Among the many strange things about DC’s (and Marvel’s) handling of it’s back catalog is that doing these books correctly would be cheaper and more efficient than the work intensive archive format. Just scan the comic books, adjust levels and all done! It’s funny, nearly every other corporate entity in entertainment does at least a half decent job handling its history… But not these guys. No volumes of simple reproductions of the best of Cole, Beck, Mayer, and on and on, right though to more contemporary work like Smith and Steranko, both just recently butchered by recoloring jobs. It’s just ironic that the reprint boom has taken hold (so really, I’m grateful for the insane amount we do have. There’s a Funnyman book!) but the two biggest players stubbornly won’t play along and probably never will.
Dan, I think what DC and Marvel don’t recognize is there is a group of fans who won’t buy their books (because they are poorly produced) which is just as large as the group who does buy their reprint collections.
The fans who like the archive format are for the most part very concerned about the format staying as it is, because they like the way the books look on a shelf.
They to are large extent feel that scans are an inferior means of reproduction even in instances where stats or original art aren’t available.
Recreated art is something which would never be tolerated in an art book.
Perhaps the best comparison might be Japanese prints.
Japanese prints are woodblock reproductions. Like Dore illustrations the print you see is based on a piece of original art which has been transferred (cut) to a woodblock almost always by a different hand than the one which created the original art (not so different from how a penciled comic book page is often transformed by an inker who didn’t pencil the page). Not really very different from comic books in many ways.
Would an art book publisher like Abrams even consider publishing a book collection of Utamaro prints based on recreated line work and colour rather than reproducing the prints by scanning or photographing them?
As Dan points out even in instances where DC and Marvel have access to high quality stats of the original B&W art, they often manage to ruin the work with awful colouring.
I expect this problem to become worse not better.
The recent Tales of Asgard book from Marvel had the colourist adding details not found in the original art, not just suggesting volume, but drawing in anatomy, and background detail.
I expect the next step will be fully painted Alex Ross style recreations designed to appeal to current mainstream super hero comic book fans.
@ Patrick Ford: Well, sadly most of these Archives fans are more concerned about favorite characters, continuity and checklist than with the moral and aesthetic rights of the artists who produced their fetish objects. It’s pathetic.
DC at least has a collection of the Monster Society of Evil storyline coming out. It’s part of their newish DC Comics Classics Library line of overpriced comics. They also published a Swanderson Superman collection as part of the line. It’s better then nothing 🙁
The Monster Society book has been canceled.
DC has made some recent movement towards reproducing Golden Age material from scans as opposed to having a crew of production people redrawing, retouching, and recoloring pages. As Dan pointed out scans are not only the best way to reproduce old comic books, they are also the cheapest way (unless the original art or stats exist, and then the “new” colour can become a problem).
Unfortunately the scanned DC books are poorly formated. Because DC is concerned with a fan base which wants all their books to be the same height, the comics are reproduced smaller than the original printed size, the inside edge of the pages are gobbled up by the book gutter, while there is a great deal of “dead space” at the top and bottom of the pages.
Ideally comics should be reproduced at original printed size or very slightly larger.
If scanned pages are reproduced much larger than the original printed size it only magnifies the printing defects in the original.
The D&Q Stanley books, and the Fletcher Hanks books get it right.
The pages are reproduced a bit larger than they were originally printed. but not so large as to draw attention to the slight bleeding of the black line work which is unavoidable with comics printed on newsprint.
Another “prisoner of DC”, maybe even more prominent than those Fiore mentions: Alex Toth. He’s had a few pretty inferior hero stories reprinted (many of them in collections that are now also out of print), but he produced a hell of a lot of comics for DC that hasn’t seen the light of day in half a century or so. Bad recoloring aside, DC could use something like Marvel’s “Visionaries” series: affordable, artist-focused “best of” hardcovers that serve as samplers for the featured artist’s body of work. (And actually, the colors on those books aren’t nearly as bad as on the Masterworks stuff. And they’re slightly oversized, which is nice.)
And I realize this is heresy but I sometimes enjoy the Archives’ recoloring jobs — Danny Vozzo’s atmospheric tones over Joe Kubert’s stuff on the Hawkman one looks quite swell if you can set aside any notions of fidelity or artistic purity. Of course, it’s way more problematic with artists like Steranko who not only colored their own stuff but colored it specifically for reproduction on newsprint….
[…] Comics Comics labels Sheldon Mayer a "prisoner of DC." C'mon, DC, at least put out a Sugar and Spike Showcase. I know Sims and Sterling would buy […]
A decent Toth collection from DC would be pretty amazing. Especially if rights don’t prevent them from including a HOT WHEELS story or two. Throw in some early western and romance work, 1970s stories like “Soldier’s Grave”, “Is A Snerl Human?”, “The Tally”, “Burma Sky”, maybe that Superman/Batman thing that Terry Austin inked.
I don’t really mind new coloring, as long as it doesn’t try to compete and ultimately obscure the black underneath, and if they have access to the original art or crisp copies I prefer that be the source of the reprint rather than the printed comic. The coloring in old comics is very rarely thoughtful or effective enough to preserve at any cost. But based on what I’ve seen there isn’t yet a really good way of extracting a high enough quality copy of just the line-art from a printed comic color comic book without losing something and requiring more retouching (sometimes leaning over to redrawing) from other hands than I’m comfortable with.