Reading Issue #2 of Oz-story Aloud to My Kids

Like the first, the second issue of Oz-story Magazine collects a original and reprinted Oz and Oz-adjacent comics and prose stories, edited by Hungry Tiger publisher David Maxine with art direction by Eric Shanower. Like the first, it's a beautiful package, and like the first, I read it some of it aloud to my two children.

Oz-story Magazine, Number Two
edited by David Maxine
art director: Eric Shanower

Anthology published: 1996
Contents originally published: 1905-96
Acquired and read aloud: February 2026

There wasn't as much that was read aloud-able as in the first issue, however. The main star of the volume is the novella "Dorothy and the Mushroom Queen," where Dorothy, the Glass Cat, and Flicker explore a recently discovered underground kingdom of mushroom people. This is credited to "Janet Deschman," but actually the work of Eric Shanower—which I feel like should have been obvious, given Flicker is a character from one of Shanower's Oz comics. It's a well done story of a classic Oz format: the group of weird and antagonistic life-forms our heroes must escape using their wits. (See, especially Dorothy and the Wizard.) The idea that the underground people would think the Glass Cat the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, and that she would be taken in by this, is probably the high point of the story; I love the Glass Cat, and this is a good showcase for her at her best.

The only other story I read aloud to my kids was "Christmas in Pumperdink," one of Ruth Plumly Thompson's pre-Kabumpo Pumperdink short stories. Certainly cute enough.

This issue's complete Oz-adjacent novel is Policeman Bluejay by L. Frank Baum, one of his "Twinkle tales"... but it's the seventh story in a series, and though it stands alone just fine, it seemed I ought to read the previous stories to the kids first. So I skipped it in favor of picking up the complete Twinkle Tales volume, which I'll detail in a future post.

The volume's other prose features didn't strike me as being as kid-friendly, so I just read them to myself. "The Magic Land" by Eloise Jarvis McGraw (illustrated by Lauren Lynn McGraw) is about how Baum came to write the Oz books, which I didn't think my kids would find interesting. I certainly knew they would not be into "Abby" by Eric Shanower, which picks up the adventures of Twink and Tom, the child protagonists of Jack Snow's The Shaggy Man of Oz. (It includes illustrations from Shaggy Man by Frank Kramer.) One, they definitely don't remember Shaggy Man, and two, the story focuses on Twink (now Abby) and Tom as middle-aged adults trying to reconcile their strange childhood experiences with the realities of middle-aged adulthood! This I quite enjoyed; it has a well-done melancholy tone, and it also does some interesting stuff with the concept of Oz-as-reality. Baum and his later imitators often used the conceit that Oz was real, and they were relaying what happened there... but what would it be like to get home to America and for a book about you to be published!? Shanower posits that the kids had no contact with Snow, but the book's prose was all accurate, though the pictures were not. (I felt a little bit of a slam against Kramer here when Abby observes that Kramer drew her differently in different pictures!) Shanower also suggests that while the story was never wrong, it didn't include everything: that Conjo was creepier than he comes across in the book, that there were logistics about bodily functions that were omitted. I liked this a lot; one of the things I always enjoy about Oz books is their methodical, realistic nature within a fantasy framework, and Shanower simply ups the ante on that here for an adult readership. I really liked this story... and I want to know what happened to Tom!

There are also some comics, a mix of old and new; my seven-year-old read these to themself, and I also read the ones that interested me. There's "The Greed Goblin of Oz" (story by Shanower, art by Anna-Maria Cool), a cute story about a goblin who preys on greed but struggles because the Scarecrow has none; a very weird 1946 Mary Marvel comic that includes robots of some Oz characters (it very much seemed to be made up as it went along); the second half of Walt Sprouse's adaption of The Land of Oz; and "Skin Deep" (story by Shanower, art by Archie's Dan Parent), a fun story about an ugly monster seeking transformation.

The very best thing in the whole issue, though, is the back cover: "If Six Great Cartoonists Had Drawn Oz Comics!" Shanower gives us six panels from potential Oz comics, each one in the style of a different artist. I didn't recognize all of them, but we get a Little Nemo pastiche, an Annie pastiche, a Scrooge McDuck pastiche, and so on. The very best of these, though, is the Jack Kirby one, which renders a scene from Ozoplaning with the Wizard in the style of the King. First, Shanower just totally nails the Kirby style in this panel... but moreover, what a genius combination! If ever there was an Oz novel in the Kirby metier of the technological sublime, it surely was the bizarre but propulsive story of Ozoplaning. I would pay real money for an entire adaption of Ozoplaning in Kirby's style, I love the idea so much. At the very least, if Shanower sold a print of just this panel, I would snap it up in a heartbeat.

Peter S. Beagle, In Calabria (2017)

In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle

Published: 2017
Read: December 2025

One of my wife's favorite ever books is Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, so I periodically buy her other Beagle fantasy books as presents. I have never read The Last Unicorn, though—nor, I think, anything else by Beagle. (I will get to Last Unicorn in 2044(!) as part of my project to read Hugo-winning and Hugo-related books.) Several years ago, I bought her this unicorn-focused book by him; back in December, I semi-randomly plucked it from her shelves and decided to give it a go, as my introduction to Beagle.

I'm not going to write off Beagle based on this one book, but I did not particularly enjoy this. Beagle writes well, and creates an evocative setting and a clearly drawn central protagonist... but the story itself I just didn't care for at all. An old Italian man discovers a unicorn is living on his farm and must protect her from the world, that's fine, but really the unicorn comes across as a sideshow to the main plot, which is that a hot twenty-something woman falls in love with him for no readily apparent reason, the end. I'm not opposed to an age-gap romance, but there's no work put into this one. Love is work, but this guy does none (at least in the relationship, he puts work into the unicorn), he just gets rewarded with a hot chick. Evocatively told, but I hope other stories by Beagle have better premises than this.

Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part II: Devastation Derby! (US #15-16 / UK #54-63)

In the Til All Are One compendia, the two prose stories from the 1985 UK annual are placed in volume four, with the stuff that doesn't fit. Since I'm trying to read these stories in a hybrid chronological/publication order, I wanted to read them among the 1985/86 stories. The Transformers Wiki will tell you that the lineups in these stories pretty much preclude them from fitting anywhere in the main US/UK comics continuity, but it does say that most of the characters in "Missing in Action" were introduced in UK issue #53, and that the sequel to "Missing in Action" in the 1986 annual ("The Return of the Transformers") references the events of UK issue #65, so I've placed "Missing in Action" in between those two points; there's a continuity gap between UK issues #58 and 59, so that works nicely. "Hunted!" pretty much doesn't fit anywhere according to the wiki, so I just read it alongside "Missing in Action." In retrospect, since it includes Megatron as Decepticon leader, I think it would read better in the nebulous, nonexistent gap during the original US miniseries where other early UK stories take place.

"I, Robot-Master!" / "Plight of the Bumblebee!", from The Transformers US #15-16 (Apr.-May 1986) / The Transformers UK #55-58 (5-26 Apr. 1986); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

written by Bob Budiansky and Len Kaminski, penciled by Don Perlin and Graham Nolan, inked by Keith Williams and Tom Morgan, lettered by Janice Chiang and Bill Oakley, colored by Nel Yomtov

from The Transformers US #15

I have bad memories of the US stories from when I previously read them on their own; these are certainly the kind of stories that explain why. Like many recent US stories, "I, Robot-Master!" seems to indicate Bob Budiansky has lost interest in the Transformers themselves, as this focuses almost entirely on humans trying to cover up the existence of Giant Alien Robots from Space on the earth. This isn't a bad premise per se, but the way it's carried out here isn't particularly interesting, either: the Intelligence and Information Institute of the US government recruits a comic book writer to pretend to be a human terrorist masterminding the Transformers, though by the story's end, he's working for the Decepticons. There are some decent jokes (I liked the gag about Donny's cigarette) but it goes on too long compared to how interesting it is (Donny is just not interesting enough as a person to sustain this). Also, this is the debut of Don Perlin, who I think becomes better later on, but at this point is just not very good at drawing giant robots.

 

The story that follows this, though, is worse: Shockwave decides to disable Bumblebee, calling him the weakest of the Autobots... completely coincidentally at a time when Bumblebee leaves the Ark on his own because he's feeling down. Bumblebee ends up falling in with a pair of two-bit crooks and helping them do crimes. Like... why? Again, you could probably tell a good story with these ingredients—one where Bumblebee gets a sense of belonging from these guys, but then realizes they're toxic—but instead it more feels like he passively sits there and lets them do stuff until he doesn't. The end.

 

"Missing in Action" / "Hunted!", from The Transformers Annual [1985]; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Four (2025)

written by James Hill, illustrated by John Stokes

from The Transformers Annual [1985]

These two prose stories from the 1985 UK annual were apparently written to focus on characters who hadn't yet made it into the main comic. In "Missing in Action," Tracks falls in with a pair of two-bit crooks and helping them do crimes... why was this a thing? The best part of the story is the appearance of a kid, Danny Phillips, who is a strong viewpoint character in the tradition of Buster and Man of Iron's Sammy. The other story, "Hunted!", has the Autobots discovering a nefarious plot by Megatron in South America. It's fine. In both cases, the selling point is clearly the John Stokes art; in particular, catch that beautiful title page image of Ravage in "Hunted!" That said, given the point of these stories is to highlight toys, it's weird there aren't more images of actual Transformers in these stories. A lot of the pictures are just of humans doing human things!

 

Robot Buster! / Devastation Derby! / Second Generation! Part 1 / "The Special Teams Have Arrived", from The Transformers UK #54 & 59-63 (29 Mar. & 3-31 May 1986); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

stories by Simon Furman; plot idea by Barry Kitson; pencils by Barry Kitson, Will Simpson, and John Stokes; inks by Barry Kitson, Tim Perkins, Will Simpson, and John Stokes; colours by Josie Firmin, T. M. Cooks, and John Burns; letters by Annie Halfacree and Mike Scott

This run of UK stories focuses on Buster, first as he attempts to augment his abilities so he can hang out with the Autobots and then as it's discovered the Creation Matrix being installed in his mind has had lingering effects. The idea of Buster getting a robot suit to fight alongside the Autobots is a bit silly, to be honest, and I did not find this to be among Furman's better work on the title so far. Of particular note is how the stories attempt to integrate the new Combiner toys (the "Special Teams") into continuity. They would not appear until much later in the US stories, but Hasbro needed them to be in the UK comic earlier as the toys were on the shelves. So that their eventual debut in the comic would not be contradicted, Furman solved this dilemma by having Buster dream about the impending characters! This happens in the Second Generation! story in issues #63-65; a three-page preview of the story was published in issue #54. This preview works on its own fine as a regular (if incomplete) tale, but if you read it in the context of Second Generation! is cleverly revealed as a fragment of Buster's dreams. (The compendium places it before part 1 of Second Generation!, but I think it reads better between parts 1 and 2.)

from The Transformers UK #54

Anyway, so this might be clever from a storytelling construction standpoint... but I hate combiners. They are good toys (I assume: I wouldn't know, I've never owned any), but bad as characters in actual stories, since you suddenly add a half dozen new robots whose main function is to not have distinct personalities. Making your combiners just dream characters makes it all even worse because they're not even real!

This is the fifth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #17-20 and UK issues #64-74. Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 
4. US #13-14 / UK #42-54 (1985-86) 

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Graphic Novellas #9–11

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Sith Hunters

Published: 2012
Acquired: November 2012
Read: January 2026

Scripts: Henry Gilroy & Stephen Melching, Justin Aclin
Art: Vicenç Villagrasa & Vicente Ibañez, Ben Bates, Eduardo Ferrara
Colors: Marlon Ilagan, Michael Atiyeh
Lettering: Michael Heisler

With these three graphic novellas, I finally come to the end of my journey through all of the Clone Wars–related content of the old Star Wars "Expanded Universe." (Well, EU content that I care about; there were many more tie-ins I'm sure!)

Of these three, I found The Sith Hunters the least interesting. This is about a recently resurrected Darth Maul and his brother (who, even by standards of Star Wars villain names, is a bit obvious: was "Savage Oppress" ever going to work in logistics?) going on the run from both Jedi and Sith while Obi-Wan leads a Jedi task force to hunt him down. It seemed to be a fairly close sequel to a Clone Wars episode I hadn't seen, which isn't really the book's fault, but negatively impacted my enjoyment nonetheless. As result, the story doesn't really begin... but it also doesn't really end, either, I'm assuming because things had to be left open for if Maul ever reappeared in the tv show. 

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Defenders of the Lost Temple

Published: 2013
Acquired: June 2014
Read: January 2026

A lot of these novellas will send a set of familiar Jedi characters on a mission (usually, Obi-Wan, Anakin, and someone from the movies) along with one original character. In theory, I appreciate the introduction of original characters... but the one in this story is plainly just Bruce Lee as a Jedi, and usually that's the issue with these original characters: there's so little to them it feels pointless. 

Of these final three, Defenders of the Lost Temple was my favorite. No familiar characters in this one (at least protagonist-wise); it's about two Jedi and a squad of clones sent to secure an ancient artifact. Justin Aclin's story has some nice beats, with a strong character focus, as the story's padawan befriends a dopey clone who thinks he might have the Force in him. Decent art from Ben Bates, a bit more expressive than is the norm for this series.

It does suffer a bit from being clone-focused: four identical characters in identical outfits are a tough thing to pull off in comics, and I sometimes lost track of which one was which. But this is the kind of one-off action-focused story this series excels at at its best.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Smuggler's Code

Published: 2013
Acquired: July 2014
Read: February 2026

The Smuggler's Code is somewhere in between the two, quality-wise. Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka are on a beach vacation when Obi-Wan notices a criminal who eluded his grasp years ago. He won't let Anakin and Ahsoka help, but ends up gaining the assistance of a suspicious smuggler.

It's basically fine. There's little to do with the "Clone Wars" here, but the story is competent enough, though a bit predictable. I didn't care much for the art style; I do think the 3D The Clone Wars show had a much less comics-friendly art style than the 2D Clone Wars show, but I also think Eduardo Ferrara hasn't really made it work. Too jagged.

All in all, this is a fun enough series, if not as good as the Clone Wars Adventures series it supplanted. They work well enough on their own; I will probably give them to my kid to read during the gap between Episodes II and III as we make our way through the Star Wars saga. 

The SFWA Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Complete Set

In 1965, the Science Fiction Writers of America was founded. In 1966, they presented the first Nebula Awards for the best sf of the previous year. But what about the best sf up prior to that point?

The SFWA held a vote, and the result was an anthology of twenty-six short stories from 1929 to 1964, entitled The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, edited by Robert Silverberg. This was published in 1970 by Doubleday and remains in print, though now from Tor. 

This must have been a success for everyone involved because it was followed up in 1973 by The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, edited by Ben Bova, which collected the best pre-1964 novellas. Collecting twenty-two novellas would make the volume quite massive, so it was split into two hardbacks, volumes two-A and and two-B. These also remain in print from Tor.

I acquired volumes one and two back in 2007 when I was invited to pick through the sf books of the late brother of one of my mother's friends. Story-for-story, volume one is excellent, one of the best sf anthologies I've ever read; if I was going to teach some kind of general sf survey, it would definitely be on the syllabus. Weirdly, I didn't find volume two-A very satisfying, but I do think that volume two-B had as good a hit rate as volume one.

---

The SFWA must have wanted to keep a good thing going (my understanding is that the organization receives the royalties from the books), because 1981 and 1986 saw the release of volumes three and four, respectively. (Volume three was edited by Arthur C. Clarke and Geo W. Proctor; volume four, Terry Carr.) But with the best pre-SFWA stories collected, these shifted to collecting the best stories from the SFWA era, which is to say, Nebula Award winners. Volume three collects Nebula-winning short fiction (short stories, novelettes, and novellas) from 1965 to 1969, and volume four from 1970 to 1974.

These seem to me to be kind of redundant, given the SFWA already publishes annual volumes of Nebula winners, and the hit rate is presumably lower when you're collecting the sixteen best stories of five years, not the twenty-six best of thirty-five. I imagine readers must have felt the same, because these volumes have no subsequent US editions after their original publications by Avon. 

I own both volumes three and four; I found them in used bookstores in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Of the two, I have only read volume three. It was fine. Some excellent stuff, but indeed, not as strong as volumes one or two-B.

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I have read other histories of the SFWA's Hall of Fame series, and they usually stop here, but that's not really where it ends! In 1991, the name of the organization was changed to "Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America." Volumes three and four of the Hall of Fame do contain fantasy stories because fantasy is eligible for the Nebulas, but volumes one and two did not. So the SFWA held a new vote, for the best fantasy short fiction up to 1990.

The result of this was The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, published by Harper in 1998. (Confusingly, in 1983, Silverberg had already co-edited an anthology with this title, released by Arbor House.) This is billed as being as good as the original Science Fiction Hall of Fame, but I would guess for whatever reason it has not had the staying power, because it did not stay in print.

Back in 2019, upon finishing volume three, I tracked down a copy of this online; I'd never encountered it in the wild, and it seemed like I wasn't going to if I hadn't done so after ten years. 

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There is one final "Hall of Fame" volume from SFWA, but it's very different from the others. The SFWA European Hall of Fame is a collection of translations of non-Anglophone sf from Europe, containing sixteen short stories; this was edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow, published by Tor in 2007. I believe it was funded by a grant from the SFWA, hence the title.

I did encounter this in the wild, to my surprise, given fifteen years had passed without me bumping into it. It was in the book room at ICFA a couple weeks ago, and I immediately grabbed it. As you can see in my photo above, it is very different from the others! I had been hoping its dimensions would match.

But I'm always happy to have a complete set of any series; it only took me nineteen years in this case! (I am the only LibraryThing user to own all seven volumes, fact fans.) Hopefully it doesn't take nineteen years for me to get around to reading my remaining three volumes. 

Orson Scott Card, The Worthing Chronicle (1983)

Early in his career, Orson Scott Card published two books, both with the subtitle The Worthing Chronicle: Hot Sleep and Capitol. Hot Sleep was more of a traditional novel, about the character of Jason Worthing; Capitol was a story cycle filling in the backstory of the world Worthing came from. Card later came to dislike both books; Capitol was completely withdrawn from publication, while he revised Hot Sleep into a new book, called just The Worthing Chronicle. (Still later, he republished The Worthing Chronicle with the stories from Capitol that he actually liked in a collection called The Worthing Saga; that's the iteration that actually remains in print, I believe.)

The Worthing Chronicle by Orson Scott Card

Published: 1983
Acquired: mid-1990s
Reread: December 2025

As a kid, I inherited an enjoyment of Orson Scott Card from my mother, and The Worthing Chronicle was one of the sf novels of his we owned. A few years ago, I read Capitol seeking stories for my class on life extension in sf, which made me want to reread the novel that followed on from it and used its world.

The Worthing Chronicle is set in the far far future, in a world where no one dies or suffers great pain... until one day, when that changes. At the same time, strangers arrive at the inn where the main character, Lared, lives with his parents. These strangers are from space, have great powers, and are clearly linked to the great change that has taken place. The book integrates a story about Lared with a number of flashbacks telling the story of Jason Worthing, which begins with his boyhood on Capitol from Capitol, but goes far beyond it as Worthing becomes the progenitor of a new breed of human.

There is definitely a subgenre of sf about evolutionary leaps forward, new humans with amazing powers who use those powers for good or for ill. (See, for example, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human.) It's not a subgenre I care for, whether I am supposed to admire the "throw-forward" or despise them; I feel like the kinds of questions these stories often ask just don't interest me. The Worthing Chronicle, even though it is a very late example of that genre, is no exception. Should a secret cabal rule all of humankind for its own good? Would humans be humans if they never experienced pain or death? I don't know, and I don't really care, and to the extent that I do care, I feel like it probably would be better to never experience death even if that diminished our "humanness" in some kind of way, and I feel like Card uninterestingly stacks the deck in favor of the opposite outcome.

Overall this is decently well told, and I did like Lared, but I didn't find the story being told very interesting. There's a lot of nastiness in this book. As someone who enjoys a bit of textual analysis, I am mildly curious about what kind of revisions Card did to transform Hot Sleep into this book... but not so curious that I would actually go and read it. Card did eventually republish Hot Sleep as a serial in his online magazine. Skimming it, it seems like the big change was the addition of the Lared narrative, and thus the editing down of Jason's story.

Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part I: Dinobot Hunt! (US #13-14 / UK #42-54)

This set of stories is mostly UK stories, with a couple US ones at the end. In the early years of the book, at least, there's pattern of four US issues and then a set of UK stories and so on; in this case, though the four US stories span two of my posts, so I'll cover the other two US ones from this sequence next week. It also incorporates two "special" stories: one from the 1986 UK annual (I haven't even gotten through all the stories from the 1985 annual yet, but this one fits best here) and one from... Woman's Day!?

Crisis of Command! / The Icarus Theory / Dinobot Hunt! / "Victory!" / "Shooting Star!" / "Rock and Roll-Out!" / "The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas", from The Transformers US #13-14 (Feb.-Mar. 1986) / The Transformers UK #42-54 (4 Jan.–29 Mar. 1986), The Transformers Annual [1986], and Woman's Day 26 Dec. 1985; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

scripts by Mike Collins, James Hill, Simon Furman, and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Geoff Senior, John Stokes, Barry Kitson, Will Simpson, and Don Perlin [with Herb Trimpe]; inks by Geoff Senior, John Stokes, Barry Kitson, Will Simpson, Marc Griffiths, Tim Perkins, and Al Gordon; colours by Steve Whitaker, Gina Hart, Stuart Place, Jeff Anderson, and Nel Yomtov; letters by Mike Scott, Starkings, Annie Halfacree, and Janice Chiang

from The Transformers UK #44

Crisis of Command! picks up on a detail seeded in the previous UK story about how Optimus is feeling a lack of confidence in his abilities following how Shockwave removed his head and almost made off with the Creation Matrix. In later years, Optimus's crises of confidence would go so frequent one wondered how he ever rose to a position of leadership at all, but this one is decently done; he waffles a bit, and then realizes he is awesome, crisis over. This is nicely paralleled to the various Decepticons jockeying for authority in the absence of Shockwave.

Then we have two Dinobot-focused stories. In the first, The Icarus Theory, a human scientist dredges up the body of Swoop and figures out how to remote control it. This was, like most Furman stories, interestingly told, though I found the climax a bit rushed and underbaked. It leads into the next; Ratchet realizes Swoop was rendered mindless by his millennia of submersion in the Savage Lands and that the other Dinobots (who departed for parts unknown) would have suffered the same, so the Autobots must hunt them down... only there are Decepticons on their tail. I found Dinobot Hunt! confusing and jumpy, a rare total misfire from Furman. Partially the issue is too many characters; I usually struggle to keep track of the largely indistinguishable G1 characters. I did like the epilogue story, "Victory!", about what the Dinobots dream as they await repair and revival. You can't go wrong with Geoff Senior drawing the Dinobots!

from The Transformers US #13

One thing that has surprised me about this project is that I did not have very good memories of Bob Budiansky's stories... but his stories from issues #5 to 12 have been quite good. Not high art, but solid kids' comics; the way he has kept the sf elements grounded in the real world through Buster has been quite effective. But in the two stories here, I feel like Budiansky has completely lost, almost overnight, what made the early stories work. (In his history of the comic, Stuart Webb speculates Budiansky thought he would be off the book at issue #12.) 

In the first, we finally learn what happened to Megatron, trapped in gun mode when last seen. A cowardly hood finds him, using him to strike at his enemies. I feel like this had real potential, but there's barely any Megatron in the story. Aside from a brief conversation, Megatron is mostly trapped in gun mode, so he's just a nice weapon for the protagonist to yield. Imagine if the emphasis of the story wasn't on Megatron-as-tool, but Megatron-as-advisor, if he'd helped this guy by encouraging his ruthless side. So much better!

The other story is the first of many dumb Decepticon plans we'll be subjected to. In this one... they are stealing music from rock concerts? Okay sure. Both are drawn by Don Perlin; his work isn't great but I seem to recall he comes to grips with Transformers better as he goes.

from Woman's Day 26 Dec. 1985

Lastly, there's a very short story (just four pages) originally published in Women's Day, I guess so moms could share it with their kids. It's a Christmas tale, so the compendium puts it later, with the 1986 UK Christmas strip, but in terms of narrative and character status, it fits in nicely after US #14. Just ignore the fact that it was Christmas only a few strips ago! It's fine, you know.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #15-16 and UK issues #54-63. Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 

DC Finest Science Fiction: The Gorilla World by John Broome, Sid Gerson, Murphy Anderson, et al.

DC Finest: Science Fiction: The Gorilla World

Collection published: 2025
Contents originally published: 1953-54
Acquired: December 2025
Read: February 2026

Writers: John Broome, Gardner Fox, Sid Gerson, Mann Rubin, Edmond Hamilton, Arthur Wallace, Jack Miller, Otto Binder, Sid Miller, Jerry Coleman

Pencillers: Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, Mort Drucker, Henry Sharp, Jim Mooney, Carmine Infantino, Alex Toth, Frank Giacoia, Jerry Granedetti, Sy Barry, Virgil Finlay, Howard Sherman, Irwin Hasen
Inkers: Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, Sy Barry, Bernard Sachs, Jim Mooney, Frank Giacoia, Ray Burnley, Joe Giella, Virgil Finlay, Howard Sherman, Carmine Infantino

Letterers: Gaspar Saladino, Pat Gordon

Early solicitations of this DC Finest volume—which collects a bunch of science fiction tales from various DC titles from 1953 to '54—indicated it was about a "gorilla world." Someone on Reddit posted a complaint that he had bought the book for gorilla action, and that there are just two gorilla-related stories in its 600 pages. Instead, he had to read about some guy called Captain Comet!?

Well, suddenly I was interested. I became a fan of Captain Comet with his starring role in the 2007 Mystery in Space miniseries, and have enjoyed some of his other appearances in series like L.E.G.I.O.N. and R.E.B.E.L.S.; back in 2012, DC solicited an "archive edition" of Captain Comet stories, which I did preorder, but it was cancelled.

This volume contains sci-fi material (normally I try to say "sf," not "sci-fi"... but this material is definitely sci-fi, not sf) from Strange Adventures, Mystery in Space, and Action Comics. Mostly they are standalone one-off tales; if you've read any of DC's horror anthologies from around the late 1960s and early '70s (e.g., House of Mystery, House of Secrets, The Witching Hour), as I have, you'll recognize the format. There are a few recurring features: in addition to the Captain Comet stories from Strange Adventures, there are also stories about Tommy Tomorrow of the Planeteers from Action, "Interplanetary Insurance, Inc." from Mystery in Space, and the very first "Space Cabbie" story from Mystery in Space #21 (by Otto Binder and Howard Sherman), which would go on to become a recurring feature.

I have enjoyed some archival Captain Comet stories I've read (e.g., those reprinted in DC Super-Stars of Space), but these struck me as rather anodyne. Later creators would do good stuff with this setup, but here, the character is pretty bland. The most interesting ones here are definitely Strange Adventures #35, where he meets the "Guardians of the Universe" (writer John Broome clearly beginning to iterate concepts he would crystallize much more successfully in Green Lantern a few years later; art by Murphy Anderson) and #39 (by John Broome and Murphy Anderson), where he testifies against a murderous sapient gorilla (mostly because I enjoyed how this one started in medias res with a whole implied adventure beforehand).

Did no one ever retcon these guys to somehow be the same at the Green Lantern Corps's Guardians of the Universe? I am surprised.
from Strange Adventures vol. 1 #35 (script by John Broome, art by Murphy Anderson)

The Tommy Tomorrow stuff, though, was even worse. This guy has no personality and, as far as I could tell, no consistent supporting cast or worldbuilding from story to story. He's very very occasionally been brought back, but I assume only because later writers would have read these stories when they were five. Outside of indiscriminate nostalgia, I don't see what you could enjoy in these tales. 

The only person who has less of a personality than Tommy Tomorrow is one of Tommy Tomorrow's subordinates.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #195 (script by Otto Binder, art by Jim Mooney)

On the other hand, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the stories of "I.I.I.": Interplanetary Insurance, Inc. I don't know why someone at DC Comics thought kids would love stories of an interplanetary insurance fraud investigator, but it's the exact kind of mixing of the mundane and the fantastic that I enjoy. The stories don't always make a lot of sense on their own terms (maybe you should investigate the life-cycles of newly discovered aliens before selling them life insurance?) but the idea was wacky enough to be delightful. Similarly, the one "Space Cabbie" story here is good fun, and you can see why DC picked it up to be a recurring feature later on. DC has brought back Space Cabbie occasionally, but where is my return appearance for Bert Brandon of I.I.I.!?

My seven-year-old kid read the book after I was done with it; when I asked what they thought of the I.I.I. feature, they didn't even remember it. (Captain Comet was their favorite.) I can't imagine why not!?
from Mystery in Space vol. 1 #18 (script by Sid Gerson, art by Carmine Infantino & Sy Barry)

Outside of those features, this is entirely done-in-one standalone tales. Like I said, it reminded me a lot of the DC horror anthologies I've read... but those were much more consistently enjoyable than these. Is horror an easier genre to get right than sci-fi? Or have 1960s horror trappings just dated less than 1950s sci-fi trappings? The stuff here is largely pretty cheeseball. Lots of bug-eyed aliens and mad scientists who invent amazing technologies but can't think of anything better to do with them than petty theft. Every now and then there was a good one in a sort of sub-Twilgiht Zone kind of way. My favorite was probably "The Eye-Dropper World" (from Strange Adventures #42, by Otto Binder, Murphy Anderson, and Joe Giella), where a guy evolves a species of oversized paramecium to sentience in his backyard with tragic results.

I was going to ask if this guy had institutional approval, but actually, if they're not vertebrates, you can do whatever you want!
from Strange Adventures vol. 1 #42 (script by Otto Binder, art by Murphy Anderson & Joe Giella)

So, overall, this is fine in terms of actual reading experience. But it's great in terms of the archival experience: I suspect most, if not all, of these stories have never been reprinted before; the "DC Finest" volumes have given us some sure things, like "triangle era" Superman and the Jim Shooter Legion and Mike Grell's Green Arrow, but I appreciate very much their commitment to more forgotten aspects of DC's long publication history. I doubt this well sell as well as any of those, but I hope we get more volumes of Silver Age sci-fi.

Reading Ages of Oz: A Dark Descent Aloud to My Kids

The second Ages of Oz book is also the last, though it clearly wasn't intended to be the last, as it ends on a cliffhanger. It picks up right from the end of the first: having defeated the Wicked Witch of the South and liberated the Quadling Country, Glinda and her friends are attacked by the combined forces of the other three Wicked Witches. They fend off that assault, but end up separated: Glinda goes off on her own to learn more about magic from the person who trained her mother, while Locasta and the others go on their own quest to liberate Locasta's brother, who is working for the Wicked Witch of the North.

Gabriel Gale's Ages of Oz: A Dark Descent
by Lisa Fiedler
illustrated by Sebastian Giacobino

Published: 2018
Acquired: December 2025
Read aloud: December 2025–January 2026

I happen to also be watching the Star Wars movies with my kids, and I realized reading this book that it very much takes its structure from The Empire Strikes Back. Glinda has the Luke subplot: splitting off from the others, meeting a seemingly decrepit old person who turns out to be the wise mentor they were seeking, the mentor turns out to have a personal link to them, once their training is done, they must rush off to help their friends who have ended up in danger. And, like I said, the whole thing ends on a cliffhanger, and it's kinda similar to ESB as well, as it's one where someone close to hero is missing and in danger. (Though the circumstances are very different, and the hero does not learn that they are related to any of the villains.)

This isn't a complaint per se, though I feel like once I noticed the similarities they were hard to ignore. Both of the Ages of Oz books have a certain derivative vibe; in addition to the Star Wars parallels, they also comes across as Oz for the Harry Potter generation, with their emphasis on riddles and artifacts and sometimes overly complicated exposition. I found myself wishing the characters were doing things that were actually clever more often, and less figuring out weird riddles with arbitrary answers; I wish also there was more emphasis on the importance but also difficulty of bravery and teamwork here. 

The end is pretty good, though, and I did like the subplot about Locasta's wayward brother.

Even moreso than in the first book, there's a decent amount of that "joining the dots" thing prequels often do. Glinda meets the Nome King, for example, and we find out how he ended up with his Magic Belt. Fiedler does a good job of capturing the personality of Roquat as he was in Ozma of Oz, and we even get an appearance from Kaliko. (Why are the Nomes under Oz, though?) We also find out how the Golden Cap ended up in the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West, even though the Winged Monkeys originated in the Gillikin Country (as chronicled in Wonderful Wizard, though there are some inconsistencies with what the King of the Winged Monkeys told Dorothy). 

On the other hand, there are ways the join is not very obvious. Why is Mombi not the Wicked Witch of the North, but some kind of overlord, disembodied Krumbic witch? Assuming that Locasta is indeed the Good Witch of the North, it's not clear how the statement from Dorothy and the Wizard that "a good Witch had conquered Mombi in the North and Glinda the Good had conquered the evil Witch in the South" is going to be fulfilled. And if this book takes place a century before the arrival of the Wizard, why do Glinda and friends defeat the first two Wicked Witches in quick succession, and then the others not at all? If Locasta is the Good Witch of the North, why is she an old lady when Dorothy arrives in Oz, but Glinda just a young woman? These aren't criticisms per se, but it's hard for me to intuit where future installments in this series would have gone, had they happened.

I really don't buy, however, the involvement of a young Nick Chopper in these events. Why, in Wonderful Wizard, did the Tin Woodman never say, "Oh, I used to hang out with Glinda and her family?" And why is Nick's rival for Nimee Amee's affections a musician, and not a soldier?

Overall, this one had some interesting moments but I also think I found it less engaging than A Fiery Friendship. I do continue to wish there was more emphasis on the characters: Shade is still a weird blank, and Ben's commitment to the cause in Oz seems very random, and I want more of the "fiery friendship" between Glinda and Locasta the title of the first book promised us. On the other hand, my kids definitely enjoyed this, and if there were future installments, I would definitely read them. My older kid, in particular, was very disgruntled to learn there was no resolution to the cliffhanger ending forthcoming. Over seven years later, it seems unlikely there will be more... although I guess maybe the rights will have reverted to "Gabriel Gale" and he could maybe self-publish a followup or something.

First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (anthology, 2004)

My senior capstone back in undergraduate was about digital narratives; I took it with the delightful Professor Laura Mandell, who was just beginning to get into it as a research area, and I think was using the class to sort of figure out things for herself. She later ended up moving to Texas A&M and founding a digital humanities center there. She put a lot of books on the reading list, and some she never actually required us to read in the course. Eventually, I put these on my own reading list... and so two decades later, I finally got around to reading this one, First Person, an anthology of critical essays about "new media" from MIT Press.

First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan

Published: 2004
Acquired: August 2006
Read: December 2025

Anyway, reading a book about digital media from 2004 is a weird time capsule, because of course the range of digital media has changed an incredible amount in the last two decades, and I often had reactions reading this book along the lines of, "Man, I bet these people wish they knew about Facebook or ChatGPT."

Even aside from that, though, I didn't find much of interest in this book, perhaps due to my bias as a literary scholar—most of the contributors seem to be coming more out of the gaming studies space, which isn't a criticism of them, but does mean that the critical conversations they care about are not the critical conversations that I care about. There's a lot of very formalist stuff; including a diagram with arrows in it in your critical essay is a surefire way to get me to tune out. I did occasionally find stuff of interest, but that was rare. I did really enjoy "How I Was Played by Online Caroline" by Jill Walker, about an "online drama" that unfolds in real time over weeks via a blog site.

The book also suffers from being overdesigned. Each of the regular critical essays has a response essay; this essay runs along the bottom of the pages of the regular essay, which means when you finish an essay, you then need to flip backwards to read the response. But then each essay also has an online response, which you can read in full on the book's web site, but is excerpted here, and then the author of the original essay responds to the responses; again, you get an excerpt here from a longer piece on the site. I am not sure why all of this is needed. I certainly never bothered to go to the site and read a piece in full! Some of the response essays are kind of embarrassing and I can't believe they got printed; Markku Eskelinen's response to Henry Jenkins's "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" misreads Jenkins so badly that Jenkins's response to the response begins, "I feel a bit like Travis Bickle when I ask Eskelinen, 'Are you talking to me?'" (Eskelinen's own essay is also pretty bad, to be honest, claiming that narrative has nothing to do with videogames at all. I can buy a claim that literary scholars focus too much on narrative in videogames, but to claim they are not stories is patently absurd.)

The book garnered two sequels, duly titled Second Person (2007) and Third Person (2009), but I don't have any interest in tracking them down. If you do game studies or "new media" (they must call it something else these days, right? it's not really "new" anymore), I suppose this book might appeal to you, but probably also I'd imagine it's been largely superseded.