Saturday, June 30, 2007

Best of DC Blue Ribbon Digest #29 - Oct. 1982

sgFive brand-new Sugar & Spike stories? Huzzah!

Since its safe to assume that DC did not commission Sheldon Mayer to do new material just for this digest, these stories must have been done earlier and never used, so DC figured this was a great place to run them. Throw in some Binky and some Stanley & His Monster, and you've got one fun collection of stories!

There's a one-page story, "Pint-Sized Nature Study" that runs on the inside front cover, then we open with "The New Pull-Toy", which is one of the all-new stories. After that are:
"The Mystery of the Bouncing Stick"
"Spike Discovers the Ocean"
"The Flashlight"
"The Present"
"Spike's Adventure with the Air-Waves"
"Lion in the House"
the all-new "The Big Hippo Mystery"

...then we have a detour into a Binky story, "The T.V. Man" by John Albano, Win Mortimer, and Bill Draut, and then it's back to S&S with the all-new "Adventure in the Animal Place", and then an all-new Stanley and His Monster story, "Stanley's Birthday Party" which is uncredited. But since it was originally produced for the never-published Stanley and His Monster #113, we can safely assume it was at least drawn by Bob Oksner and Tex Blaisdell, who did all the previous Stanley stories.

Sugar and Spike then round out the issue with "How Sugar & Spike Became A Pair of Christmas Dollies", and one final one-page story, "Romance--Half-Pint Style", which features a Batman cameo!

I don't think I'm saying anything new stating that Mayer's Suagr & Spike stories were--are--a delight. Wonderfully fun for kids, but with charm and wit. It was great that DC dusted off these stories and brought them back again, with Binky and Stanley, to boot!

If you wanted to get a real little kid a good First Comic, you could do a lot worse than this. And you can find copies on ebay for just a few bucks!

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