Sugar & Spike: DC Comes to its Senses, Then Remembers That it is DC and Screws Up Again

For about ten seconds, all was right in the universe. Next summer, DC Comics is going to reprint the first ten issues of Sheldon Mayer's amazingly funny and cute Sugar & Spike.



Unfortunately, reality soon set in. They're doing it as a pricy, sixty dollar hardcover in their Archives line. Amazon listing.

I think somebody at DC missed the bit about these being kid's comics. The really crazy thing is that they have recently started up a line of 100-page $8 books reprinting recent superhero comics, and that's a line that makes sense for the material, even more than those big, thick Showcase Presents books. Look, Sugar & Spike is wonderful and silly, but it is for children. Sixty-dollar hardcovers are not. Get your heads together, DC!

Fantagraphics Announces Barnaby for 2012

Here's some nice news from Fantagraphics. Just the other day, I was selling a customer on how she needed to buy a copy of The Carrot Seed on account of the nice cover artwork by Crockett Johnson, and now one of our favorite US-based publishers announces a complete run of the artist's celebrated Barnaby, which ran in newspapers from 1942-1952. Says Eric Reynolds over at Fantagraphics:

"This is a dream come true for us at Fantagraphics; Barnaby has literally been at the top of our wish list (or mine, personally, at least) for over a decade. The series will collect the strip's original run of dailies (, from April 1942 through February 1952, including the Ted Ferro and Jack Morley run from January 1946 to September 1947, for which Johnson consulted on before coming back to the strip for good until it's end in 1952."

Of course, we have to temper our enthusiasm just a hair when the announcement goes on to include a request of collectors for best-possible-quality copies of the first nineteen months of the strip. I think that's the same damn issue that's delayed their projected Pogo reprints for more than three years. Here's hoping the first book of Barnaby will indeed be on the shelves in April '12, in time for the strip's seventieth anniversary!

Additional, superior reporting available from Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, who broke the story and Heidi McDonald at The Beat.