Return to Oz: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2009 (contents: 2008-09) 
Acquired August 2012
Read September 2016

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Adapted from the novel by L. Frank Baum 

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Writer: Eric Shanower

Artist: Skottie Young
Colorist: Jean-Francois Beaulieu
Letterer: Jeff Eckleberry

I got this to write a paper about it a few years ago, but never sat down and read it properly until I was recovering from surgery last year-- it was a good choice for that. It's a really interesting kind of adaptation, and one you can only do in comics, in that it is simultaneously completely faithful to the original and wildly divergent. The marketing material and Shanower's preface and afterword explain how the adaptation honors the original text, and indeed it does, down to including (a shortened version of) Baum's own introduction to the novel before the story begins properly:

This establishes the book firmly as the work of L. Frank Baum from the first page, as does the cover, which privileges his name significantly over those of the two people who actually made it!

The graphic novel renders a lot of textual details other adapters haven't bother with, and even uses Baum's own narration to populate the narration boxes. Sometimes Eric Shanower's script overdoes it, such as with this bit where the Good Witch of the North does a spell to find out what Dorothy should do to get home:

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #1

I'm sure there's no other adaptation that bothers with the spinning-hat-transforming-into-a-slate bit, but Shanower's captions are largely redundant here-- I feel like he's not trusting the art enough. This is from (I think) the first issue, though, and I'd guess that Shanower hadn't yet learned just how incredible an artist Skottie Young is. They obviously develop an amazing working relationship with time, but here it was early days still.

Skottie Young is a gifted artist who comes up with amazing character designs that capture the spirits of the characters. For example, I love how he depicts the Cowardly Lion as a giant ball of fluff:

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #2

But like I said, the comic can be both faithful and unfaithful at the same time. The divergences come from the visuals. Here's how the Tin Woodman looked in the original novel:

illustration by W. W. Denslow (from the 1987 Books of Wonder facsimile of the original 1900 edition, p. 55)

Here's Young's design for him:

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Sketchbook

His Tin Woodman is often hunched over and has very small eyes in very deep sockets, making him seem eternally depressed, which fits with Baum's depiction of a character who regrets even stepping on an insect, yet it is very different from Denslow's shiny and upright Tin Woodman, who looks perpetually cocky and pleased with himself.

Young's depiction is faithful to the words of the novel, but not to its images. Baum is mentioned a lot in the paratext of the Marvel Wizard of Oz, but W. W. Denslow is hardly mentioned at all. Yet when the original novel came out, Baum and Denslow were about as equally famous. They had previously worked together on Father Goose: His Book, of which the real star is largely considered to be Denslow's work. The design of the first edition of Wonderful Wizard places a lot of emphasis on Denslow's pictures. But in the picture above we see that not only does Skottie Young ignore Denslow's design for the Tin Woodman, he even bases the Woodman's appearance on Baum.

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #3

So the book is maybe not as pure as it claims to be, but this is not a bug, it's a feature. Shackled to Baum's depictions but freed from Denslow's, Young is free to do some magnificently imaginative work that captures the glory of Oz in a different way than Denslow did:

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #4

The comics medium especially allows Young to bring out some of the violence implicit in the original text. Baum would commonly depict very macabre happenings in a very matter-of-fact way. In the original novel, the Tin Woodman is cursed so that he cuts off his limbs one by one, but he doesn't make this sound very distressing at all: "the axe slipped all at once and cut off my left leg. This at first seemed a great misfortune, for I knew a one-legged man could not do very well as a wood-chopper."

Young includes a flashback that brings out the horror of the event:

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #2

In this version, the Tin Woodman's matter-of-fact language comes across as emotional distance from what must have been a great trauma. Even in silhouette, it's horrifying-- there's blood and shit flying everywhere!

Similiarly, contrast Denslow's take on the Woodman's fight with the Wicked Witch of West's wolves:

illustration by W. W. Denslow (from the 1987 Books of Wonder facsimile of the original 1900 edition, p. 142)

...to Young's:

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #5

One will give you nightmares. One will not. This both is and is not there in the original text, and when Young draws it in this way, it allows him to be faithful and unfaithful at the same time. Even when the illustrations aren't particularly violent per se, he can still capture some of the violence through textbook use of the "gutter":

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #3

We don't actually see the wildcat's head get chopped off, but thanks to the way Shanower and Young panel it here, we imagine it a lot more vividly than we do in the Baum and Denslow version. As Scott McCloud would say, "To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths."

Young's illustrations fill what Brian Thompson calls the "drive to concretise," the desire to see the original captured in its every detail in "an actual moving-image experience." Thompson was discussing motion picture adaptations of novels, but comics can sometimes fulfill the desire for concretization more strongly than film can. In providing a concretization that differs from the one suggested by Baum and Denslow, Shanower and Young have shown the true potential of the prose-to-comics adaptation. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is largely faithful in terms of narrative to the original, but its tone is different: it is darker and lighter, with more of a sense of wonder at times. This kind of adaptation can easily recall the old and simultaneously do something new, a form of layered fidelity, simultaneously faithful and unfaithful in different registers. Which, one might argue, is the real goal of all adaption. Nostalgia and newness all at once.

Next Week: A return to The Marvelous Land of Oz!