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.

Reading Toto of Oz Aloud to My Kid

Gina Wickwar's second Oz book following The Hidden Prince of Oz is also the last one published by the International Wizard of Oz Club. It came out over eighteen years ago, the longest gap the Oz Club has ever had between continuation novels (the previous record was seven years between Ozmapolitan and Wicked Witch and between Wicked Witch and Hidden Prince). I'm guessing this means no more continuation novels for the foreseeable future; my understanding is the Oz Club printed way more copies than there was demand for the books, and now the physical supply is something of an albatross. (According to some articles I read about Wickwar, she was working on a third Oz book, a sequel to Queen Zixi of Ix called Queen Zixi in Oz, but there's no sign of it many years later.)

Toto of Oz by Gina Wickwar
illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2024
Read aloud: December 2024–January 2025

For Hidden Prince and Toto, at least, there is a faint whiff of "why bother?" about it all. I don't mean that in a mean way, but previous Oz Club publications had been further installments by Royal Historians (Ruth Plumly Thompson, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw, Rachel Cosgrove Payes), or those associated with them (Dick Martin), giving them something of an official imprimatur. Hidden Prince and Toto, though, are indistinguishable from so many of the other latter-day canon-consistent Oz publications from the likes of Emerald City Press or Hungry Tiger Press or the Royal Publisher of Oz.

In this one, Toto loses his growl again (the previous occasion being a somewhat underexplained subplot in Lost Princess) and sets out on a quest to find it again, alone, being too proud to tell everyone else what's wrong. Meanwhile, in the Scotlandesque country of Kiltoon, King Firth the Fourth's bride-to-be vanishes on their wedding day, causing the royal poet to venture forth on a quest... though not to find princess, but to kidnap Toto and bring back to Kiltoon to cheer up the king, who loves dogs. Meanwhile meanwhile, an orphan boy named Davy is whisked away from Louisville, Kentucky on the day of the Derby along with a horse named Lollipop; when they arrive in Oz, they find out that some enchantment prevents Lollipop from speaking, unlike most animals in Oz, the solution to which can be found in Kiltoon.

Like Hidden Prince, it has a Ruth Plumly Thompson vibe, and like Hidden Prince, I found it a bit weak... though I did enjoy it more than Hidden Prince. Hidden Prince was overstuffed with returning and original characters, and though there are probably still a bit too many here, it's not as overwhelming as in Hidden Prince. Sonny probably doesn't need McTavish the hoot owl with him, though, a character we are often told is grumpy but rarely seems to do anything actually grumpy; Davy and Lollipop don't need to be joined by a pair of living condiments, but thankfully, Wickwar seems to realize that herself, because she packs them off pretty quickly (similar to moves made in other overcrowded Oz books, like Hidden Valley). To that subplot's benefit, Toto has just one other character, Gladstone the guinea pig (he's a pig who makes gold guineas, a joke totally lost on the children of 2025, or indeed I suspect, 2006).

Still, I think all three subplots would have benefited from more characterful moments, the kind of thing the McGraws were so good at in Merry Go Round. Davy and Lollipop would have benefited from stronger interaction; their emotional bond should have been a key part of the book, a thing Thompson was great at with her human/animal pairs, like Pompa and Kabumpo, Ojo and Snuffer, Speedy and Terrybubble, Tompy and Yankee, or even David and Humpty. It's trickier to do if the animal can't speak, but Baum managed to give Hank more of a personality in Tik-Tok of Oz before he could talk than Lollipop gets here. Similarly, I think Gladstone could have been put to better use; surely Toto's character arc ought to have been him overcoming his pride and learning to accept help, but it's strangely muted if that's what Wickwar was going for.

Still, though, I found this fun to read aloud. The Scottish kingdom of Kiltoon (like many of Thompson's vaguely European pocket kingdoms, in the Gilliken country) lends itself to a lot of enjoyable accents, though my Scottish is a bit hit-or-miss! Queen Finna (who turns out to be a sea fairy from Baum's The Sea Fairies) is a great villain, one my kid loved to hate, even if I found the parameters of her exile to Oz somewhat underexplained. There are also, somewhat unusually for an Oz book, a few scenes of physical peril that kept my kid on edge, such as attacks by various guards. And though few post-Thompson authors have been as good as her or Baum for coming up with interesting weird places to visit, Wickwar's rate is above average, with the Dog Pound and the Isle of Sandwich.

Like a lot of Thompson novels, though, the ending is a bit of a letdown, with Ozma and Dorothy using the Magic Belt to just appear in Kiltoon and sort everything out, though Wickwar does manage to give most of the main characters a nice moment of heroism or two. And unlike in Lost Princess, we actually do get an explanation of what happened to Toto's growl! And indeed, my kid was hooked to this idea of re-losing the growl.

So overall fairly enjoyable; I would read a third Oz book from Wickwar if it continues to upward trend, though at this point it feels somewhat unlikely.

Next up in sequence: The Rundelstone of Oz

Reading The Hidden Prince of Oz Aloud to My Kid

My six-year-old and I are rapidly running out of "quasi-canonical" Oz books. Unlike previous books published by the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Hidden Prince of Oz has no connection to any Royal Historian; rather, the Oz Club ran a competition to find a book manuscript to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar
illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Published: 2000
Acquired: May 2024
Read aloud: October–December 2024

This is probably the reason for a (pretty minor) bit of backstory about the Wicked Witch of the East and the Tin Woodman; the novel takes place one hundred and one years exactly after she passed away. Aside from that, though, Hidden Prince reads much more like a Ruth Plumly Thompson pastiche than a Baum one: we have a small kingdom with comedy advisors, an orphan propelled to Oz in somewhat contrived circumstances, a nonhuman character who turns out to be another character under an enchantment, and a climax that features a wedding (various examples of these tropes: Kabumpo, Grampa, Giant Horse, Yellow Knight). As a Thompson fan, I don't mind this... but I found this book to be a drag. 

The fundamentals are good. In one subplot, the illegal magician Zeebo disappears, and his two faithful pets, the parrot Beak and the teacup poodle Penny (complete with magical teacup, of course) must set out to rescue him; in the other, the American orphan Emma-Lou winds up in the Oz kingdom of Silica along with a living wooden Indian from the porch of an Arizona trading post. Two small animals against the fearful world seems like fertile ground for an Oz plot; I really like Oz books where seeming underdogs go on dangerous quests and prove themselves (e.g., Wonderful Wizard, Patchwork Girl, Kabumpo, Merry Go Round). But Penny and Beak quickly get lost in a slew of characters that join their quest; Ketzal the feathered boa is a fun idea, but there's also a completely pointless bit about a leperchaun. In the other plotline, you barely get to know Emma-Lou and Chief Thundercloud because they're joined by Bungle the Glass Cat, Princess Vitria of Silica, and her cousin Vitrix. More and more characters are piled on, until by the end of the novel we also have the Tin Woodman, the Wizard (though he leaves before the climax), Smithereens the third assistant glassworks keeper, Venté the passenger pigeon, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the Saw-Horse. And I think I am probably forgetting someone else! Any one of the added characters are fine on their own, there's just not enough space for them here. Wickwar should have saved them for another book!

None of the characters gets the space to do anything interesting or clever or memorable, and it seems like in many cases they just get a line of dialogue or bit of action per chapter so you don't forget about them... but that often seems outside their scope or personalities. (Penny and Venté, for example, carry bags of gold, which seems unlike for two characters with no hands!) The cores of the book (in my opinion) ought to have been 1) Penny and Beak's devotion to their master, who frankly doesn't deserve it, and 2) Emma-Lou's finding of a place in the world, probably with Thundercloud. The two animals should have stayed on their own; Emma-Lou and Thundercloud should have gone on their quest with just Bungle at most. But these things are buried under a piling-on on incident and characters, and Emma-Lou weirdly ends up adopted by Zeebo, a character 1) she only just met, and 2) who has displayed nothing but dubious moral character the entire novel! She should have become a princess with Cyan and Vitrea! And why does Vitrea have to give up her kingdom for a man, anyway?

Anna-Maria Cool illustrates, and proves herself a solid mid-tier Oz artist. She's no John R. Neill or Eric Shanower... but then, who is? She's good at bringing characters to life in particular; her faces have a real liveliness to them that really helps with the book's storytelling.

On top of all this, I don't think the book is longer by word count than a typical Oz book, but it's got thirty chapters instead of the usual twenty-something; this means that if you read a chapter aloud on alternate nights (as I do), the book does seem to drag on, taking over a month to get through. (Reading it back to back with Ozmapolitan revealed that I use the same voice for Eurkea and Bungle, a sort of "southern belle" accent. I guess it just seems right for cats.)

All that said, though, when I asked my six-year-old if they liked it, they said yes, and when I asked what, they said, "All of it." I think they particularly liked the unusual characters like Penny and Ketzal, so it's a shame they didn't have more to do.

Next up in sequence: Toto of Oz