Escaping the Prison-House: Visualcy and Prelanguage in Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike

This project involved collecting Sheldon Mayer’s comic book series, Sugar and Spike (DC, 1954–71) for close analysis of the paratextual matter (letter columns, paper dolls) and recurrent themes, with special attention to the larger historical context of youth responses to censorship and changing literacies. In “Escaping the Prison-House,” I argue that Mayer uses his title characters’ babytalk to indulge in imaginatively escaping the alienating limitations of linguistic interpellation, while hinting at the subversive potential of a then-maligned medium.