Reading Issue #3 of Oz-story Aloud to My Kids

As previously discussed here on this blog, I've been rereading some of the early L. Frank Baum Oz books aloud to my kids. So far, we've done The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Marvelous Land. But in between these, we've been working in some later "apocryphal" Oz books based on when they take place. So, for example, we read Donald Abbott's Speckled Rose between the first two because that's when it's set. In between Marvelous Land and Ozma, we read issue #3 of Oz-story Magazine because it contains the story "Ozma Sees Herself" by Edward Einhorn, which is set during that span; I also read the kids a couple other stories from the book I thought they would be interested in, and then read the rest of the book to myself.

Oz-story Magazine, Number Three
edited by David Maxine with Eric Shanower

Anthology published: 1997
Contents originally published: 1901-97
Acquired: May 2026
Read: May–July 2026

"Ozma Sees Herself" is set shortly after Marvelous Land, and concerns something L. Frank Baum himself was resolutely uninterested in: the psychological ramifications of Tip's transformation back into Ozma. It's pretty short, but like all of Einhorn's Oz work, well done. It also introduces Ozma to the Hungry Tiger; I was a bit surprised that Einhorn had the Tiger and the Cowardly Lion know each other from before Dorothy met the Lion, because I personally am a fan of the interpretation that the Tiger we see in Wonderful Wizard when the animals beg the Lion to kill the giant spider is the Hungry Tiger. But that's a quibble: the idea that Ozma sees a beautiful nymph and comes to recognize it as herself is a clever one.

The book also contains three installments from W. W. Denslow's newspaper strip that featured the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. (Denslow and Baum shared copyright on the first book, and each made their own attempts to capitalize on the success of the stageplay adaptation of it; for Baum, that was Marvelous Land and its own stageplay adaptation, while for Denslow, it was a series of short stories he wrote and illustrated himself.) Denslow is an amazing illustrator, of course, but his writing does not really hit the tone of an Oz story. His work actually reminds me a lot of the next Oz-illustrator-turned-writer, John R. Neill—basically anything can happen if it gives Denslow an excuse to draw something interesting. For example, in these stories, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman can casually travel to America! Overall, they're pretty harmless and forgettable. If you care about timelines, they probably take place between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, except for the first one, which includes Dorothy. This is about her being sad because it's Christmas and she's away from her family; my understanding is that Oz timeline aficionados place it during Wonderful Wizard, in the segment after the Wizard has left Oz in his balloon, before the characters get the idea to go see Glinda for help. (Hungry Tiger Press later collected all of Denslow's stories in a book called The Scarecrow and the Tin-Man of Oz, which I own but have not read. Maybe someday I'll read it to the kids.)

This volume didn't contain as much kid-friendly material as some other installments of Oz-story; the only other thing I read aloud to the kids was "Spots in Oz" by Rachel Cosgrove Payes, which features the leopard with changing spots named Spots from The Hidden Valley of Oz. It was two years ago that we read this book, and it is honestly pretty forgettable, so Kid One has only a vague memory of Spots, and Kid Two doesn't know it at all. This story isn't much cop either, but it's fine. It also features the Hungry Tiger, so that lined up nicely with "Ozma Sees Herself" and our imminent rereading of Ozma of Oz.

There's some original comics material here, all written by Eric Shanower, with various illustrators (including himself); I particularly enjoyed "Poppies," a one-page conversation between Ozma and Dorothy about the poppies Ozma wears in her hair, with beautiful artwork by Ramona Fradon.

In terms of prose, ones I read to myself included "Buffalo Dream" by Jane Mailander, which was a reprint from an anthology of original sf&f. This is about a strange thing that happened to Oscar Diggs—the man later known as the Wizard—during his time as an itinerant circus performer in Nebraska. It's very different from an Oz story, but I really enjoyed it: a melancholy story about the last of the buffalo, told in the first person. "It was very long ago... and far stranger things have since happened to me." Reading it in this context, it's immediately obvious who the main character is, but it would have been fun to encounter it in the wild. 

There are a couple Baum reprints; the one of "The Glass Dog" from Animal Fairy Tales is fine. This issue's full-length novel is his The Flying Girl, originally published under the pseudonym Edith Van Dyne in 1911. The novel is about a brother and sister; she's seventeen and working as a secretary to help the family make ends meet, he's a recent engineering grad from Cornell who can only find employment in an automobile repair shop, but soon gets swept up in the mania for flying. He develops his own airplane, and the two must navigate the skullduggery of potential investors to support their invention... as you might guess from the title, she ends up being the one to fly it!

I found it a quick and charming read. I was surprised by some of the turns some of the characters take; Baum actually does a decent job avoiding what initially seem like some obvious directions. While Baum's main talent was surely in his fantasies, he was able to turn his hand to other genres quite successfully. In fact, though, I would say the book is clearly science fiction! It is about a new technology, one that's not real at the time the story was written, and the ramifications of it. If this isn't sf, then I don't know what it. 

I should also point out that while there is some surprise at the idea of a "flying girl," there no resistance. I bet if someone remade this book now, there'd be a bunch of misogynists going, "NO FE-MALE IS SUITABLE FOR FLYING!" In fact, we get the exact opposite from one of the characters: "The most successful aviators of the future... are bound to be women. As a rule they are lighter than men, more supple and active, quick of perception and less liable to lose their heads in emergencies. The operation of an aeroplane is, it seems to me, especially fitted to women."

Though, the same character goes on to make this prediction: "The airship of the future will not be a passenger affair... but an individual machine for personal use. They’ll be cheaper than automobiles, and more useful, for they can go direct to their destination in a straight 'airline.' Men will use them to go to business, women to visit town on shopping expeditions or to take an airing for pleasure; but I’m sure they will be built for but one person." Whoops!

Two other things of note. First, there's some discussion of mental illness and domestic abuse that really does not past muster in 2026, and made me very glad I did not elect to read the book aloud to my kids:

"He says that—that you abused his sister," doubtfully remarked the girl.
     "Well, I did," said Cumberford, calmly. "I pounded her two or three times. Once I choked her until it’s a wonder she ever revived."
     "Oh, how dreadful!" exclaimed Orissa, shrinking back.
     "Isn’t it?" he agreed, lighting a cigarette. "Only a brute would lift his hand against a woman. But Burthon's sister—my wife—had a fiendish temper, and her tantrums aroused all the evil in my nature—there's plenty there, I assure you. It was the time I choked her that Burthon had me arrested for cruelty. She had put poison in my coffee and I took the fluid into court with me. Burthon said I was lying and I asked him to drink the coffee to establish his sister’s innocence. But he wouldn’t. Pity, wasn’t it? The judge begged my pardon and said I ought to have choked her a moment longer. But no; I’m glad I didn’t, for she died naturally in the end. My dear daughter, whom I sincerely love, is like her lamented mother, except that I can trust her not to poison me."

Egads, I don't even know what to say about all that.

On the other hand, the "daughter" referred to in that passage, Sybil, very much reads as autistic to my 2026 eyes. Here's her first appearance:

As they went up the path Orissa, anxious to be sociable and to put the stranger at her ease, said brightly: "Don't you think the ride out here is beautiful?"
     "Yes," responded Sybil.
     "The orange groves are so attractive, just now," continued Orissa.
     There was no response.
     "I hope you enjoyed it, so you will be tempted to come again," resumed the little hostess.
     Miss Cumberford said nothing. Her father, a step in advance, remarked over his shoulder: "My daughter seldom wastes words. If you wish her to speak you must address to her a direct question; then she will answer it or not, as she pleases. It's her way, and you'll have to overlook it."

As the father of an autistic kid, this could be describing their approach to social interaction to a T!

Anyway, I was pretty into this. The sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, was reprinted on its own by Hungry Tiger Press, so I'll probably end up picking it up at some point. (I gather the first book had minimal illustrations; it's been reillustrated here by Eric Shanower.) 

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 Issue #1 of Oz-story Aloud to My Kids

Oz-story Magazine ran for six years, collecting a mix of archival and original Oz and Oz-adjacent fiction and comic strips. It was published by Hungry Tiger Press, with editing by Hungry Tiger publisher David Maxine and art direction by his partner, Eric Shanower. It contains a number of pieces of Oz short fiction you can't find elsewhere, so I decided to incorporate it into the Oz books I've been reading my kids. Even though it's called a magazine, it's bound like a book and runs 128 pages and even has an ISBN.

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

Anthology published: 1995
Contents originally published: 1906-95
Acquired and read aloud: September 2025

The first issue contained four short stories that I read aloud to my kids. The first was "Percy and the Shrinking Violets" by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; this brings back Percy the giant white rat from her novels The Hidden Valley and Wicked Witch of Oz. Unfortunately, even though it was just over a year ago that we read these books, my seven-year-old did not remember Percy at all! The story, where Percy—and then later, Ozma—is shrunk by a magical violet is fun enough, though one feels like Ozma and Percy are a little slow on the uptake at times.

Before Ruth Plumly Thompson became an Oz writer, she published short tales of a kingdom called Pumperdink, which she revealed in Kabumpo in Oz was actually in the Gillikin Country. This volume collects one of those older stories, "The Dragon of Pumperdink," a fun story about a dragon running out of coal (Thompson's dragons die if their internal flame dies out) who needs to seek employment.

The longest short story in the book (I serialized it over three nights) is "Gugu and the Kalidahs" by Eric Shanower. This brings back Gugu the leopard from The Magic of Oz—given we read this back when my kid was three, no way did they remember Gugu! Thankfully, Kalidahs were memorable from their recent experiences of various adaptations of the original book (both the Shanower/Oz comic and the Yoto audio adaptation have gotten recent play), because otherwise there are no familiar Oz characters. The story is about how Gugu's forest gets invaded by Kalidahs, in violation of ancient treaty. and Gugu must do his best to push them out... alone. It's a tense, dark story; it's been a long time since I read The Jungle Book, but it felt like an Oz refraction of Kipling. The illustrations are not in Shanower's usual style, but they are striking.

Lastly, there's "The Balloon-Girl of Oz," credited to Stephen Kane, but actually by Eric Shanower. This focuses on my kids' eternal favorite, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, who here swells up like a balloon, and has to desperately make her way back to the Emerald City for help without floating off into space. I always like Oz stories that put the characters in a weird situation they must think through logically in order to solve, and of course pictures of Scraps looking like a balloon are going to be delightful. My kids were very much into the absurdity of this one. I particularly liked the ending, where Scraps gets to mad at all the people laughing at how funny she looks, so she just lets go and floats off into the sky!

In addition to all this, there's a couple comics; I read "The Pathetic Losers of Oz" by Ed Brubaker, about all the Oz residents with powers not worth mentioning. I did not read Walt Sprouse's comic adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz, but my comics-loving seven-year-old did.

Additionally, there's two stories I didn't read to the kids. One is a nice little piece of literary fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Outside the Cabinet-Makers," which mentions Mombi, so I guess Fitzgerald was a fan!

The other is a complete novel (over fifty pages of small type) by L. Frank Baum from 1906: Sam Steele's Adventures on Land and Sea, or The Boy Fortune Hunters in Alaska. This I read to myself after reading everything aloud to the kids. I think I made the right call there, I don't think they would have been into it, but I actually found it surprisingly fun, a boy's-own adventure about an orphan boy to enters into a partnership with his late father's business partner to hunt for gold in Alaska, but ends up finding a whole different adventure instead. (As David Maxine points out in the intro, despite the subtitle, there's only one boy fortune hunter and they never make it to Alaska!) Baum is good at putting people into tough situations they must work they way out of. Maybe once we get through all the issues of Oz-story, I'll seek out the other Sam Steele novels. (The novel was not illustrated originally, but cleverly, Shanower selects a bunch of John R. Neill illustrations from various other projects that work perfectly well; you never would have guessed!)

Reading The Living House of Oz Aloud to My Kids

Having enjoyed Paradox in Oz, my kids and I went straight on to Edward Einhorn's other Oz novel, The Living House of Oz. This is a sequel in that sense that it follows up some characters and situations from the earlier book: just like in Paradox, a bit of the action takes place in Tonsoria; Tempus the Parrot-Ox puts in a brief appearance; one of the characters comes from the same dark, alternate Oz that Ozma journeyed to in Paradox. But it's not a sequel in the sense that it's the same thing again. Einhorn isn't invested in solving Oz continuity discrepancies this time (not that he was particularly interested in doing so the first time around, to be honest... though he does explain one discrepancy he didn't squeeze into Paradox).

The Living House of Oz by Edward Einhorn
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2023
Read aloud: August–September 2025

Here, he's interested in doing two things, I would say. The first is providing a "traditional" Oz quest story in the mold of Patchwork Girl, Rinkitink, or, of course, Wonderful Wizard: in order to protect and/or return to their family, a child protagonist is forced to set out on a dangerous journey. The main character here is Buddy, who lives in the mysterious Living House, where every piece of furniture is alive... and so is the house itself! He lives with his mother, a sorceress, and like many young protagonists, yearns for adventure.

The second thing Einhorn is up to here is interrogating some aspects of Oz; specifically, Ozma's ban on magic practiced by anyone other than herself, the Wizard, and Glinda. Is this actually just? Is it right to ban people from doing the thing they're good at because it might hurt other people? Einhorn follows up various aspects of several of Baum's Oz books, most notably Emerald City (the Phanfasms reappear), Patchwork Girl (the little-used Emerald City jail and its mistress, Tollydiggle), and Glinda (the Flatheads and the Adepts at Magic). This kind of thing can feel gratuitous in the hands of later authors, but because it's all in service of one central idea, the return appearances by stuff from earlier books feel quite organic.

Like Paradox, the book has two sub-adventures, but I thought that structure worked a bit better here. In the first, the Living House comes to Tonsoria, in the Gillikin Country. Buddy goes out to explore, but ends up kidnapped when he's at the wrong place at the wrong time, along with Ayala, the princess of Tonsoria (who was a minor character in Paradox). He works to free himself while his mother, Mordra, also works to free him. It turns out that in Tonsoria, there's a guy who really like making wigs, but people in Tonsoria like doing their own hair, and so he thinks if he kidnaps the ruler, he can force everyone to wear his wigs. It's goofy but fun; Tonsoria, with its squabbling advisors and cute animal (the flutefly) has a touch of the Ruth Plumly Thompson about it (in a good way), but the whole adventure also reminded me of John R. Neill's Oz novels. Though they were never great, what I liked about Neill's Oz novels (particularly Wonder City and Scalawagons) is that I think they capture what living in Oz must be like. It's just nuts, weird things are happening all the time. Einhorn does the same thing here. Sure, the cranky old man who owns a wig factory is going around kidnapping people? Why not? It provides a bit of diversion. Will he be punished? Well, not much, and not if he says he's sorry, because people need to learn from their mistakes. And besides, life in Oz would be dull if things like this didn't happen.

This half is basically just an excuse for the second half, though. With Mordra drawn out of the Living House, she attracts the attention of Glinda, and is taken back to the Emerald City for trial. Buddy, though, thinks Ozma is likely to treat his mother unfairly, and so sets out on a quest to rescue her, with several misadventures on the way; this culminates in a reveal of Buddy's true parentage and a moment of supreme temptation for Buddy, who must learn to do the right thing. More than any Oz author other than Eloise McGraw, I would say, Einhorn is interested in the psychology of his child protagonist. The entire book hinges not just on an act of heroism by him, but him learning how the world works. It's a great moment, very well done.

Other than that, the second half of the book is just full of nice touches. More than most of Baum's imitators, Einhorn has a great sense of humor, with inspired jokes. I particularly liked the Flathead whose head is so full of information about carpentry, he doesn't know any words that begin with X, Y, or Z, so he has to contort his sentences around saying you and your. But he also can't say extra... because he's not a very good speller! The trial of Mordra is also hilarious; the Scarecrow is assigned as prosecution... but they decide it's unfair to Modra if her defense lawyer is less smart, so he also serves in that role, arguing against himself. They're the kind of jokes one could imagine Baum writing, but he never did.

My kids particularly loved the Earl of Haberdashery, the living hatstand in the Living House, who occasionally accompanies Buddy on his adventures, and is always telling lies about things he knows and places he's been and deed he's accomplished. He's the kind of delightful, kooky character who fits right alongside all the other weirdos of Oz without feeling derivative of them. And it all pays off with an amazing moment in the end where he comes through when it's clutch.

Plus, we have of course excellent illustrations from our man, Eric Shanower. Overall, this is an excellently done Oz book; had it been one of the "Famous Forty" it surely would have been in my top ten at least. I liked Paradox a lot, but this beats it for me. I'd happily read more Edward Einhorn (I gather he has a couple short stories, which hopefully we'll come to), but it's been twenty years since this book, so perhaps he's said all he has to say about the world of Oz.

Reading Paradox in Oz Aloud to My Kids

My randomizer brings me and my seven-year-old to our next apocryphal Oz book—Paradox in Oz. I know I read this before at some point, but I didn't own it until my sister bought it for me as a present a couple years ago (along with the sequel, The Living House of Oz), and it doesn't appear on my my reading list, which goes back to September 2003, so I must have borrowed it from the library when I was in high school.

Paradox in Oz by Edward Einhorn
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Originally published: 1999
Previously read: early 2000s?
Acquired: July 2023
Read aloud: July–August 2025

The big selling point of Paradox in Oz is that it promises to reconcile disparate elements of Oz continuity. This is a good selling point, sure, but the thing that makes it a good book is that this isn't really the focus. The focus is on fun Oz adventures... but ones of a different sort than you've read before.

One of the things that's interested me about rereading the Oz books as an adult is that there are a lot of elements in them that respond very directly to the historical forces and pop culture of the time they were written... but if you read them as a kid, this is largely invisible to you, because the books are a fantasy world and/or vaguely old-fashioned. For example, L. Frank Baum wrote two different novels about demagogues stirring up previously peaceful groups on a warlike footing during World War I. As a kid, that connection would have never occurred to me. Along similar but not identical lines, Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels often take contemporary pop culture as a jumping-off point; she has two different novels that riff on Hitchcock thrillers, for example. I think not only is this invisible to Oz readers, but it's also often invisible to Oz writers. Many of the post–Famous Forty pastiche writers focus, I think, on recapturing Oz as it was written c. 1900-20, seemingly not realizing that if Baum (or Thompson, or whomever) had continued writing Oz novels up to the 1990s that wouldn't just been doing the same thing over and over again, essentially pastiching themselves, but continually refracting what was going on around them through an Oz lens.

All of this is leading up to me saying that if someone wrote an Oz book now, it would incorporate contemporary culture just as Baum and Thompson did, and in the 2020s, that would be complicated stories of time travel and the multiverse... and in 1999, Edward Einhorn did just that. In Paradox in Oz, the anti-aging enchantment ceases working, and Ozma must travel back in time in order to figure out what the issue is, only she inadvertently changes history, resulting in a new timeline where Oz is a dystopia ruled by a tyrannical Wizard. The book has stuff in it like Ozma doubling back on herself again and again, and Ozma seeing into the cracks in the "Ozziverse" as it starts to collapse around her. For my kids, they know this stuff so well from pop culture that the seven-year-old was predicting turns of events! Einhorn threads the needle of doing something new and fun, while still keeping it recognizable Ozzy. There are no other Oz books about time travel... but he perfectly nails how to write one.

My kids and I particularly enjoyed Tempus, the titular "parrot-ox," who can only do impossible things. (These include being born; they are half-parrot, half-ox, but there are no parrots in Oz!) He says lots of crazy stuff which makes a weird sort of sense. (My favorite paradox, though, was probably the barber who can't cut his own hair nor let anyone else cut it.) The trip to the "dark Oz" is good without going too far; the only complaint I have about it is that it 1) it kinds of peters out, Ozma just leaves, and 2) it seems to me to be a bit more exciting than the trip to Absurd City that follows it. Not that the trip to Absurd City is bad, but dark Oz is more interesting; this means the book has the same problem as Star Trek III or Doctor Who's "The Runaway Bride," in that the most exciting part of the story is done with only halfway in, meaning everything that follows is mildly anticlimactic even when it's well done. The encounter with Tip and Mombi in the past is also interesting, and delves into an area many Oz writers have not done a lot with. I liked Dr. Majestico, and I wish we had seen more of him. (I gather there's a short story Einhorn wrote with him; I'll have to seek it out.)

As for the continuity issues—Paradox both does and does not explain them. Early in the book, Ozma summons a parrot-ox by thinking of a paradox; in this case, that in Marvelous Land she knew what a horse looked like but in Dorothy and the Wizard, a horse came to Oz for the first time. The book doesn't explain this so much as just draw attention to the fact that this kind of thing happens in Oz a lot: is the Munchkin Country in the East or the West? do people in Oz use money or not? You get different answers to these questions depending on when you ask them. But the novel also indicates that 1) Oz history is changing all the time, and 2) there are many other Ozzes. So any continuity error you think of might be answered in any one of these ways. The book also provides an explanation for why people don't age or die in Oz, when this didn't seem to be the case in early books. (It's somewhat complicated, and has to work around how come the Tin Woodman didn't die when he chopped himself up; it also doesn't totally fit with some evidence here and there that would indicate aging stopped quite some time ago... but the great thing about the book is that it provides for itself an explanation for why its explanations aren't totally consistent!) In some cases, Einhorn doesn't explain so much as just poke fun at, such as when Ozma thinks about what a stupid name "Wantowin Battles" is.

Eric Shanower's illustrations are, of course, as great as always. Tempus is great, and so are all the images we see of the dark Oz. I did think he somewhat fell short capturing the visual anarchy of Absurd City; Einhorn does his best to render a bunch of visual paradoxes in prose, but I wanted the pictures to give us more of these than it did. (It was interesting to realize my kids' understanding of perspective isn't far enough along for them to understand why an M. C. Escher illustration doesn't make any sense.)

Probably the thing that makes Paradox work more than anything else is that, like the other good writers of Oz continuations, Einhorn is an author who happens to be writing an Oz book (e.g., Eloise McGraw, Sherwood Smith), rather than someone who's just writing an Oz book (e.g., Dick Martin, Gina Wickwar). The book is lively and thoughtful and well-constructed.

Reading The Rundelstone of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, Eloise McGraw returned to Oz one last time, making The Rundelstone of Oz the last book written by a "Famous Forty" author. It was originally published in a periodical called Oz-story with pictures by Eric Shanower, and then republished as a standalone volume by Hungry Tiger Press with more illustrations.

Rundelstone is an unusual Oz novel; aside from the opening chapter (set in the Emerald City), the entire book takes place in the confines of a single village, and most of it even takes place on the grounds of a single castle! Despite this, it still manages to feel pretty Ozzy. The protagonist is a living puppet, part of a performing troupe of living puppets, but Poco doesn't, say, desire to be a real boy or anything; he just is a living puppet, the kind of thing you might expect to find in Oz. Poco enjoys his life, but suffers because of the cruel maestroissimo of the troupe, its one human member, who bullies all the puppets, but especially Poco.

The Rundelstone of Oz by Eloise McGraw
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Originally published: 2000
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: January–February 2025

Poco and his troupe come to the town of Witheraway, where Poco is enchanted—supposedly by accident—by the town's "witherd" (he's not a wizard because there's only one legal wizard in Oz), and the troupe leaves without him while he's in the form of a cuckoo clock. The witherd make him into his lead servant, but as time goes on, Poco become suspicious that there's something more afoot.

With its emphasis on its protagonist's interiority, personal fears, and character growth, this reminded me a lot of McGraw's first Oz book, Merry Go Round, and though I didn't enjoy it as much, as I did enjoy it quite a lot. McGraw is more attentive to this kind of thing than any other Oz writer, and though I can see how some readers may want more cool locations and weird creatures, I enjoyed the change of pace. It feels Ozzy enough while feeling different from all the other books too. (I've seen it suggested that Rundelstone is most like Ozma of Oz, but that really has just one confined section.) Poco is on a quest of sorts, but not a physical journey, a quest to find out what happened to his troupe and a quest to discover his own confidence. The book moves a little slowly, perhaps—an adult reader will certainly be ahead of Poco—but I found it was perfectly paced for a six-year-old listener, who will be a bit less savvy to when characters are lying and what the truth might be.

You can't go wrong with Eric Shanower illustrations; he of course brings a lot of key moments to life. My kid pronounced they enjoyed the "whole thing." They do tend to get confused when there's a lot of "off-screen" backstory, which there is a bit here, with the origin of the Spellstones in Fyordi-Zik. We're told this in a lump of exposition, and I had to remind them of it a few times later on. I only found myself dissatisfied by the very ending. Though Ozma doesn't turn up to sort everything out too early (as she does in some Oz books), meaning Poco is ultimately responsible for solving most of the situation, I did find myself wishing she'd turned up a tiny bit later so he could do a tiny bit more on his own and prove himself.

But much like with Merry Go Round, I found myself wishing there was a sequel. I want to know what other scrapes Poco and the Troupadours get into with their itinerant lifestyle—and how they get back out again!

Next up in sequence: The Emerald Wand of Oz

Reading The Wicked Witch of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Wicked Witch of Oz by Rachel Cosgrove Payes
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Like many Oz fans, I suppose, my kid likes how the books lend themselves to indexing and organizing. Four quadrants of Oz, each with its own color, and each with its own ruler. Each also has its own wicked witch... well, almost. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard stated that when he arrived in Oz, each quadrant was ruled by its own witch, good ones in the north and south, and wicked ones in the east and west, but Ozma told him that before that, the north and south had been ruled by wicked witches as well. The Wicked Witches of the East and West we of course met (and disposed of) back in the very first book, and the Wicked Witch of the North, Mombi, appeared in Marvelous Land. But who was the Wicked Witch of the South, and what was her story? My kid has long asked me this question—and from our looking at covers of future Oz books, has long known we would someday find the answer to that question in The Wicked Witch of Oz.

Published: 1993
Acquired: June 2024
Read aloud: June–July 2024

The story goes that after writing Hidden Valley, Rachel Cosgrove offered Reilly & Lee a second Oz book, called Percy in Oz. But Reilly & Lee passed on the book, and the manuscript sat in Cosgrove's trunk for forty years (by which point she had married and was known as Rachel Cosgrove Payes*) until it was published by the International Wizard of Oz Club with illustrations by Eric Shanower under the title The Wicked Witch of Oz. As is my usual method on my journey through Oz with my kid, we read it where it would have been published, not where it was, my reasoning being they were far more likely to remember and care about relevant characters in this sequence. (This does create a minor discontinuity, in that a character from Merry Go Round in Oz, which we haven't read yet, appears in a crowd scene.)

The story, like many of Baum's own, is tantalizing but light on backstory. It begins with Singra, the Wicked Witch of the South, awaking from a hundred-year sleep in her hut in the Red Forest of the Quadling Country. We are told Glinda put her to sleep (consistent with the statement in Dorothy and the Wizard that "Glinda the Good had conquered the evil Witch in the South") but given little beyond this. How did Glinda do this? Why put her to sleep (and then, apparently, forget about her)? What kind of terror did Singra get up to? We are not told, because the story much more focuses on the present-day machinations of Singra, though it does give us the tantalizing bit of information that Singra is cousin to the Wicked Witches of the East and West—our first indication in the Oz novels, in fact, that they were related to each other. (The 1939 film made them sisters.) The book does seem to indicate Singra did not rule the Quadling country previously, when she thinks about how nice it would be to rule it.

Singra is a protagonist here; many of the book's chapters follow her decisions and actions. On waking up, she learns that while she was a sleep a girl named Dorothy killed her cousins, so she plots her revenge: turning Dorothy into a piece of cheese! This requires stealing some ingredients from Glinda's palace and even capturing the Scarecrow, but things go wrong for her when she accidentally transforms Trot, thinking her Dorothy. Dorothy and Percy the White Rat (from Hidden Valley) immediately set out in pursuit of Singra, and have various adventures, meeting a "rubber band" (i.e., a band whose members are made of rubber), making friends with a living neon light named Leon, getting captured by giant bees, and being partially transformed into hummingbirds before finally catching up with Singra... who then turns Dorothy into a statue!

My kid repeatedly indicated they found the book scary and that they didn't like it. They have never like reading about "bad things" happening, and Wicked Witch has more of those than most Oz books: Singra stealing things, Singra tying up the Scarecrow and taking some of his straw, Singra transforming Trot, Singra transforming Dorothy. I think to an adult reader, it doesn't come across as terribly perilous, but it totally works for a five-year-old. (Even though at one point they told me they were pretty sure Dorothy would not be a piece of cheese in later Oz books.) It did, I suspect, keep them involved in the book—for the past year or so, we've averaged one Oz book per month (compared to our earlier rate of twenty-three in one year), but we flew through this one in just a couple weeks because they kept on asking for chapters (whereas normally we just read a chapter on the alternate days that I do bedtime). How would Dorothy be saved?

Though it has the problems in the ending of many Oz books (once Ozma knows what's going on, the book wraps up pretty quickly, because there's little Ozma can't do with the Magic Belt, the Magic Picture, and the Wizard to call upon), I too enjoyed it a lot. I do like it when "wicked" characters are co-protagonists in Oz books (e.g., Lost King, Pirates) because they are often sly and clever, and it's interesting to kind of root both for and against them. The book is much more focused than Cosgrove's Hidden Valley, with a smaller cast of characters: just Percy, Dorothy, and later Leon in the adventuring party. This means the characters all get to contribute (unlike the extraneous Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger in Hidden Valley), and Dorothy comes across as the forthright protagonist we're used to from previous books. The communities they bump into on their journey are interesting without being distracting, and like in Hidden Valley, Cosgrove is good about the characters using their cleverness to get out of situations. The incidents feel Baumian without feeling derivative; the partial forced transformation into hummingbirds, for example, recalls Road to Oz, and Leon the Neon is a great idea.

I think it's probably also impossible to understate what a difference good illustrations make to an Oz book, and Wicked Witch is blessed with ones by Eric Shanower, surely the best Oz illustrator other than Denslow and Neill. His illustrations are detailed but also whimsical, capturing the imagery of the text in an evocative way: I loved his pictures of Leon the Neon, for example, and Percy and Dorothy with hummingbird wings is an amazing visual. (Sure this is the only official Oz novel to show us Dorothy's belly button!) There's a good sense of humor to the images too; my kid and I both loved his pictures of the cheese-obsessed Percy. And the pictures aren't just there in quality, but also quantity: each chapter has a title page with a small picture, whereas the first page of each chapter has a big image that wraps around the text, spanning two pages. (J. L. Bell has a great discussion of the book's visual design here.) Indeed, there's no two-page spread of the book that is image-less; again, compare with Hidden Valley, where my three-year-old (who will read Oz with us a bedtime) would look at a two-page spread of pure text and complain, "I want to see a picture!" Crazy to think that Shanower offered to reillustrate Hidden Valley when the Oz Club republished it, and they turned him down!

Other Thoughts:

• For the first time, I think, my kid actually got a punny creation in an Oz book: they understood both meanings of "rubber band" here, being familiar both with actual rubber bands and getting what it meant to have a band made out of rubber. They boggled a bit.
  
• There is a very rare post-Neill reference to Ruth Plumly Thompson's books here, with the Wizard's searchlight (from Yellow Knight and Ojo) being mentioned, though not used, as a way to find the missing Trot.
  

Next up in sequence: Merry Go Round in Oz

* While Hidden Valley was her first ever book, by 1993 she had published numerous novels, most of them romances with titles like Love's Escapade, Bride of Fury, Moment of Desire, and Satan's Mistress. Not exactly Oz material!

Reading The Runaway in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill
edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower

There are a number of Oz books that some fans call "quasi-canonical"; that is to say, they have some sort of claim to official status, but they are not part of the "Famous Forty" (the novels from the original publisher(s) of the series). For many, it's that they were written by a Famous Forty author, but released by a different publisher. It has been my intention to incorporate those stories in me and my son's marathon through the Oz books—but where they ought to have been published, not where they were.

Originally published: 1995
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: January–February 2024

The Runaway in Oz was intended as the Oz book for 1943, but John R. Neill died before he finished editing the manuscript or even started doing the illustrations; the publisher opted to forego an Oz book for the year, and the next would not appear until 1946. In 1995, however, Books of Wonder finally published the book with the blessing of Neill's family, edited and illustrated by contemporary Oz superstar Eric Shanower. I opted to read this to my son following on from Lucky Bucky as if it was the Oz book for 1943. By the time we got to 1995, I am not so sure he would remember who, say, Jenny Jump was!

In some ways, this is probably the best of John R. Neill's four Oz books. In a comment on the late, lamented Tor.com, editor Eric Shanower says one of the things he did was "[t]ake out whatever made no sense"—in a John R. Neill book this could, of course, be quite a lot, and Runaway certainly has a cohesion lacking in, say, Wonder City or Scalawagons of Oz. It has two clear, parallel plots in the classic Baum/Thompson fashion, one about Scraps running away from the Emerald City and one about Jenny Jump, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Wogglebug trying to find her. Yet it still has that John R. Neill fancifulness, with details such as the Wogglebug literally creating a castle in the air while he dreams—one he intends to use to take a vacation!

The best part of the book is probably the beginning, where Scraps antagonizes in turn Jellia Jamb, the Tin Woodman, and Jenny Jump. Convinced everyone is "mean" for simply telling her to behave herself, she resolves to run away. It's a very child-like, very accurate response, and it led to some good moments with my five-year-old, who likes to declare that I am mean whenever I enforce a rule or boundary, no matter how gently I do it. Were Jellia or Jenny being mean to Scraps, I asked? No, he declared. Hmmmm... Will this lesson sink in? Well, I am less sure about that.

You might think, then, that the book would end with Scraps learning to accept some responsibility for her actions, but this only kind of happens. There is a great scene where Scraps returns to the Emerald City, seemingly in prisoners' garb (a sheet, in a callback to Patchwork Girl), but I feel like an author who was not John R. Neill could have pulled things together a bit more strongly. I do like the somewhat Ozzy moral that sometimes it's right to run away, but it does seem to me that Scraps largely gets away without actually learning anything even if she does inadvertently face some consequences.

So the book was lively and focused, but not always totally successful at what it seemed like it was doing, if that makes sense. And while it certainly had a coherence lacking in Wonder City, Wonder City was so manic it almost gets away with its many faults, which isn't quite the case here.

Eric Shanower illustrates, and it's certainly a beautiful edition. Shanower's character designs are clearly influenced by Neill's, but he has a somewhat different style, with a tightness of line that makes the weirdness of what he's drawing seem more real. This being a Neill novel, there's a lot of fanciful imagery, and Shanower does a great job with it; probably my favorite was the army of quinces! The flat people were also pretty great. 

I could also detect (so I believe) a bit of fannishness in Shanower's editing. This is the first book to get east and west right since Ruth Plumly Thompson took over, and there's an extended passage of exposition reversing Jenny Jump's "lobotomy" from Wonder City. Actually, I very much enjoyed Shanower's Jenny, particularly all her costume and hairstyle changes. It's a shame Neill's work is still under copyright, because that means Jenny (and Number Nine) haven't been available to other authors, and they're strong characters I'd like to see in other Oz stories. I also like the continuing friendship between Scraps and Jack Pumpkinhead.

Things my son really did not like: the stressful sequence where the air castle disintegrates, Scraps being turned all black by the quinces. But on the whole, he reported enjoying this one. Both of us like the Patchwork Girl a lot, so perhaps we were destined to! Even the three-year-old is into her; whenever we read a chapter at bedtime, he would point to the cover and declare, "Scraps is rainbow. Scraps is rainbow!" A couple weeks later, I asked him if he remembered what color Scraps was and he said "Scraps is rainbow... but she turned black!" So the books are starting to sink in for him as well.

Next up in sequence: The Magical Mimics in Oz

Return to Oz: Adventures in Oz by Eric Shanower

Comic trade paperback, 256 pages
Published 2006 (contents: 1986-93) 
Acquired August 2012
Read December 2016

Adventures in Oz

​

Writer and Illustrator: Eric Shanower

Calligrapher: Willie Schubert
Painting Assistant: Tom McCraw

Long before he was tapped to write comics adaptations of L. Frank Baum's Oz novels, Eric Shanower wrote and illustrated five original Oz comics, collected here in a single volume by IDW. Shanower's style as an illustrator I've always found very classic Oz, in that it's very John R. Neill: his Dorothy especially is a lot like Neill's. His stories here, too, are very classic Oz in style. There's not a lot of new characters or anything, rather, we have Dorothy going out on adventures in and near Oz, almost always with the Scarecrow at her side-- which of course was the very first Oz protagonist pairing. (But one not utilized much outside of Wonderful Wizard, I don't think.)

However, Shanower delves into the history of Oz in a way that is very un-Baum, as Baum was always pressing forwards, by and large. In these stories we see the tree that is the source of Oz's magic (an idea that doesn't feel very Ozzy to me, to be honest), a new character with a flashback-told link to the Wicked Witch of the West, a story about Zurline and the Forest of Burzee (from The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), and stories that fill in two gaps in the Oz cartography of witches: the Wicked Witch of the South and the Good Witch of the East. I guess what I'm saying is that the book is definitely fannish, in terms of having continuity references to obscure texts, and plugging in gaps, sort of what you might imagine if Big Finish produced original Oz audio dramas or something.

They're also fannish, though, in capturing what makes Oz such an enjoyable place to visit. Each story might have these kind of continuity-driven aspects, but they also feature journeys to strange and interesting places that feel like ones Baum could have come up with. My favorite of the tales was probably "The Secret Island of Oz": Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and Eureka go on a trip to locate an obscure fish for the gardens of the Emerald City. It feels like the kind of adventure hook Baum himself could have used for a post-Emerald City Oz novel, where this simple quest ends up getting the characters embroiled in the problems of one of those weird magical enclaves within Oz. There are strange characters, both good and evil, and some creative problem-solving, and the characters get split up and reunited-- basically it feels like a prototypical Oz adventure in miniature, and that's why I liked it so much.

The other thing to like about this volume-- and where Shanower most departs from a straight Baum pastiche-- is in the deeper emotional content of these stories. It's hard for me to imagine a Baum story where the resolution hinges on a girl re-accepting the living toy she played with as a child but abandoned (as in "Secret Island"), or one where forbidden love leads to an invasion (as in "The Forgotten Forest of Oz"), or one where a domestic dispute plays out over and over again, stuck in time (as in "The Blue Witch of Oz"). This last one was probably the other highlight of the volume for me, a story about a broken family in need of healing, with lost children and spurned love. Shanower's stories are prototypical Oz in some ways, but uniquely his own in others, the ideal balance of adaptation in my mind.

My only complaint is that it wasn't until typing up this review that I learned the hardcover version has stories and content the trade paperback I read lacks. Now I'm going to have to buy it all over again!

Next Week: Back to the beginning, with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!

Return to Oz: The Emerald City of Oz by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2014 (contents: 2013-2014)
Acquired and read September 2016

The Emerald City Oz
Adapted from the book by L. Frank Baum 

​

Writer: Eric Shanower

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

Emerald City is, as I recall, one of the weaker Oz novels, and this adaptation is thus kind of boring in itself, though it's not aided by the fact that while volumes 1-4 of the Marvel Oz comics each comprised eight issues, this one is only five. I'm sure there were good sales-related reasons for this, but I feel like it must have been a negative feedback loop: low sales lead to fewer issues leads to lower quality leads to lower sales. This awkward hodgepodge of a novel was probably never going to be great, but only about 100 pages to cover it makes it worse. There are two parallel stories: the Nome King plots an invasion of Oz while Dorothy travels to random places for no real reason. The characters are saved through luck and happenstance, while Dorothy's journeys are even more aimless than most, and she seems somewhat crueler than in Wonderful Wizard, with a very relaxed attitude towards causing damage, and a poor track record with respecting others. (She was politer when she was younger.)

from The Emerald City of Oz #1

Anyway, Shanower and Young do their best with the story they're given and the space they have-- one feels like Aunt Em vs. the Cowardly Lion would have got a whole page in the old days, but here it just nets three panels, alas. The creepy creatures General Guph visits during his recruiting drive are probably the best part, and it is nice to see Young get to draw almost everyone who's appeared in the series before one last time.

from The Emerald City of Oz #5

The real problem with this book is that it was the last one, and I'll never get to see Skottie Young draw my absolute favorite of Baum's original fourteen, The Patchwork Girl of Oz. That they could even have covered all of Baum's novels was always improbable, but surely they could have stretched to just one more. I have no doubt that Skottie and Scraps would have been a match made in heaven. Actually, he must have agreed, because he snuck Scraps into a variant cover for Road to Oz #1.

Next Week: Eric Shanower and Skottie Young might be done with Oz, but I'm not-- Trot and Cap'n Bill visit The Sea Fairies!

Return to Oz: Road to Oz by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2013 (contents: 2012-13)
Acquired and read September 2016

Road to Oz
Adapted from the book by L. Frank Baum 

​

Writer: Eric Shanower

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

Sometimes an adaptation reveals hidden depths in the source material. At other times, it reveals just how thin the source material really was. Road to Oz does the latter to Baum's The Road to Oz: this is the dullest of journey narratives, completely lacking the sense of urgency and darkness that propelled Dorothy and the Wizard. In Road, Dorothy and company (she is joined by the Shaggy Man, Button-Bright, Polychrome, and Toto) simply shuffle from place to place... and the places just aren't that interesting. I mean, Skottie Young draws nice fox people, and I absolutely love his reinterpretations of Button-Bright and Polychrome, but there's no there there, and it feels like half the book is set beyond the danger anyway, with the characters just partying in Oz. I don't remember the original book being this bad, but to be honest, I didn't remember anything about it at all except for the guy with the sandboat, which was probably a bad sign.

from Road to Oz #2

Next Week: The whole family goes to Oz, in The Emerald City of Oz!

Return to Oz: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2012 (contents: 2011-12)
Acquired September 2012
Read September 2016

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Adapted from the book by L. Frank Baum 

​

Writer: Eric Shanower

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

Dorothy and the Wizard is probably my favorite of the original six Oz novels, partly I suspect, because it's the only one of those I owned as a kid in an edition with high-quality reproductions of the original illustrations: my others were either low-quality Del Rey editions without color (Ozma and Emerald City), poorly re-illustrated versions (Wizard and Marvellous Land), or just had no illustrations at all (Road)! So to me, the underground world of Dorothy and the Wizard has always seemed particularly lavish and detailed-- and, as a result, alien. This means it's, as always, well-suited to the illustration talents of Skottie Young.

from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz #3

Dorothy and the Wizard is probably the darkest of the original six Oz novels. In the others, most of the people Dorothy meets are reasonably nice, and/or are evil thanks to external influence, and/or there's a clear end goal. For the most part, Dorothy and the Wizard lacks any of these: almost every environment Dorothy and her friends encounter is somewhere between actively hostile and completely indifferent, and there's no obvious destination for the group. There's no route to Oz that they're following, they're just trying to stay alive by moving onwards from each terrible place to another, hopefully-but-not-actually less terrible place. I wouldn't like it if every Oz novel was like this, but this one does what it does well.

from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz #5

Its terrifying Mangaboos and Gargoyles give Young so much to work with, but as I came to realize when reviewing Ozma, he best shines with the "normal" animals, this one having Eureka, Dorothy's conceited kitten (but then, aren't they all?), and the Wizard's nine tiny piglets. Because of this, Shanower and Young even manage to rescue the book's extended coda about Eureka being on trial for murder. It drags in prose, but put Young's amazing rendering of Eureka at the center, and every moment of her attitude is a joy. Plus, Shanower even uses the opportunity to smooth over some hiccups in Baum's improvised history of Oz. Another Shanower and Young triumph.

from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz #8

Next Week: Dorothy goes back to Oz, yet again in Road to Oz!

Return to Oz: Ozma of Oz by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2011 (contents: 2011)
Acquired August 2012
Read September 2016

Ozma of Oz
Adapted from the novel by L. Frank Baum 

​

Writer: Eric Shanower

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

Ozma of Oz is a bit of an oddity in the first six Oz novels: moreso than Marvelous Land, even, it's driven by plot, eschewing Baum's usual rambling journey narrative. After some independent misadventures in Ev (where she meets Billina and Tik-Tok), Dorothy links up with Ozma and sets off with her Royal Army on a mission to rescue the Royal Family of Ev from the Nome King. The book is one of Baum's better ones, and it's even better, I would argue, in the hands of Eric Shanower and Skottie Young, as like Marvelous Land, it introduces a whole new set of strange-looking characters for Skottie Young to draw the hell out of: his Tik-Tok is stalwart, his Wheelers are terrifying, his Nomes are wispy.

from Ozma of Oz #1

My favorite, though, was Billina-- Young always does a good job with the characters who are conventional animals (like the Cowardly Lion in Wonderful Wizard or Eureka in Dorothy and the Wizard), I think partially because we all know what, say, a chicken looks like, so he can get more expressive in the design in a way that he can't with a woggle-bug. His Billina is wonderfully sardonic, annoyed and unimpressed by the world she travels through and the company she is forced to keep.

from Ozma of Oz #7

I also like how Young handles Ozma: it's easy to forget in the novels that Ozma is a kid, and one only recently come into her true identity as royalty at that. Young makes sure you remember this: when she shouts, it looks like a kid trying to get her way. She's no less a princess, but it injects a certain amount of realism, even if via Young's cartoony style.

from Ozma of Oz #4

Next Week: Dorothy meets an old friend and makes some terrifying acquaintances in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz!

Return to Oz: The Marvelous Land of Oz by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 2010)
Acquired August 2012
Read September 2016

The Marvelous Land of Oz
Adapted from the novel by L. Frank Baum 

​

Writer: Eric Shanower

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

Like I said in my review of Eric Shanower and Skottie Young's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the pleasure of these Marvel Oz adaptations is in getting the familiar and the new all at once: the L. Frank Baum plots I remember from childhood, coupled with dynamic new Skottie Young illustrations. In that regard, The Marvelous Land of Oz is probably the most successful of all the Marvel Oz comics. Marvelous Land has a decent plot, less meandering than some of Baum's travel narratives, with a real antagonist (or pair of antagonists, General Jinjur and Mombi) and set of goals for our heroes (restore the throne of Oz). Tip is a fun protagonist, too, an easygoing young boy with a good fairytale backstory (oppressed servant of an evil witch, though of course it turns out to be more complicated than that). There's some random traveling, too, of course (the bit where they end up flying over the desert has always seemed a bit arbitrary to me), but moreso than many other Oz novels, this one is about overcoming a specific problem.

What Marvelous Land has in spades are visually interesting characters: the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman return, of course, and then Baum adds Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse, the Gump, and H. M. Wogglebug T.E. Each of these gives Young something to work with-- I love, for example, the way he draws the Sawhorse, as a sleek single piece of wood with these deep eyes and slightly ajar mouth that make him look like a loyal dog:

from The Marvelous Land of Oz #2

The weirdness of its characters is fundamental to my enjoyment of the Oz books:

from The Marvelous Land of Oz #6

These are books where the weird and misfits are the exalted and the clever, and in none of them is that better depicted than in Marvelous Land, and Skottie Young captures that perfectly. (Plus I love the way he draws Mombi.)

from The Marvelous Land of Oz #8

Next Week: Dorothy returns to Oz and meets a whole new crew of weirdos in Ozma of Oz!