jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

So I had this working, then I had to change around the solution and I can't get it back to where I was.

So I have a jqGrid which consists of an numeric array in each cell (huge matrix).  I have grouping and hence summaries of this data.  I built a summaryType custom function that worked great before - if I return a numeric value I see the summary, but if I try to return html I get 0 only in the result.  

If you have any ideas I'd love some help - is there some setting I need to have in place for non-numeric summary values?

Here's my setup:

function sumValueFieldArray(val, name, record) {
            var summedValue = '<span>Empty</span>';
            if (val && val != '') {
                var newArray = new Array();
                var valArray = extractSparklineData(val).split(',');
                var recordArray = record[name].split(',');
                for (var i = 0; i < valArray.length; i++) {
                    newArray[i] = parseInt(valArray[i], 0) + parseInt(recordArray[i], 0);
                }
                summedValue = newArray.join(",");
            }
            else {
                summedValue = record[name];
            }
            summedValue = lookupSparklineHtml(summedValue);
            return summedValue;
        }

function lookupSparklineHtml(cellvalue) {
            if (cellvalue == null) {
                return '<span>0</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="inlinesparkline">0</span>';
            }
            var sum = sumValueArrayString(cellvalue);
            if (cellHasHighestRankedCases(cellvalue)) {
                return '<span style="color:red;">' + sum + '</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="inlinesparkline">' + cellvalue + '</span>';
            } else {
                return '<span>' + sum + '</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="inlinesparkline">' + cellvalue + '</span>';
            }
        }

function extractSparklineData(sparklineHtml) {
            return sparklineHtml.substring(sparklineHtml.indexOf('ine">') + 5, sparklineHtml.lastIndexOf("<"));         }