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 The Shaggy Man of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Shaggy Man of Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

There are some who praise Jack Snow as a writer for his more Baumian vibe, preferring him to Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill. I don't remember his books at all, though I know I read them when I was a kid; I got them from the library so I only read them the once. When I found my spreadsheet of Oz books from when I was twelve, I rated both of Snow's books 10/10, so clearly I myself was among those who enjoyed them. But reading them as an adult, it's less that Snow has a Baumiam vibe and more that he just rips L. Frank Baum off... while not really capturing what made Baum successful to begin with.

Originally published: 1949
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: April–May 2024

It is pretty clear that to write The Shaggy Man of Oz, Snow must have reread Road to Oz, Emerald City, and John Dough and the Cherub. Road because Shaggy Man features the Shaggy Man, and that book was the character's introduction; Shaggy Man even, in a classic fanboy move, explains a seeming inconsistency between Road and Tik-Tok of Oz when it comes to the powers of the Love Magnet. But in a different kind of classic fanboy move, Snow can read the text closely enough to reconcile a minor discrepancy but not close enough to get the actual point of the text! In Road, Shaggy initially tells Dorothy that he got the Love Magnet from an Eskimo who gave it to him... but at the end of the book, he admits he actually stole it from a young woman because he felt unloved. If Snow reread Road to write Shaggy Man, he evidently didn't make it all the way to the end, because he presents the original story of the Love Magnet as fact here.

To me, this totally misses the point of not just the Love Magnet, but the Shaggy Man as a character. He's a man who was unloved but came to be loved, and then learned he didn't need this artificial tool to be loved. It's a very common trope for Baum. But there's no hint of that characterization here; in Snow's hands, Shaggy is just a somewhat genial blank slate. There's a weird bit where the Shaggy Man and his young companions, Twink and Tom, supposedly teach a group of people the true meaning of love... but they do so via the Love Magnet, which doesn't create real love at all! I mean, I guess it's very L. Frank Baum in that the book called Shaggy Man of Oz seems very disinterested in the actual Shaggy Man (see also: Tik-Tok, Scarecrow), but it's frustrating. Thompson ignored the Shaggy Man throughout her run on Oz, but despite sticking him the title, Jack Snow might as well be ignoring him too.

We read John Dough and the Cherub immediately prior to Shaggy Man because they have a side character in common, the King of the Fairy Beavers. What this revealed to me, though, was that Snow was basically totally ripping off John Dough. In John Dough, John Dough and the Cherub escape an island via a flying car they steal; in Shaggy Man, Shaggy and his young friends escape an island via a flying car they steal. In John Dough, the characters travel to Hiland; in Shaggy Man, the characters travel to Hightown. (Though Highland is nothing like Hiland; Snow uses the name as a jumping off point but that's it.) In John Dough, the characters are trapped in the Palace of Romance whose inhabitants never stop telling stories; in Shaggy Man, the characters are trapped in the Valley of Romance whose inhabitants never stop watching plays. In John Dough, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems; in Shaggy Man, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems.

My five-year-old seemed to largely enjoy the ways the books coincided; they clearly expected Hightown and Hiland to be the same things, and the Valley of Romance and the Palace of Romance to be so as well, but they soon got over it. To me, though, it was frustrating. Like, I just read this book! And like in Magical Mimics, the supposed main characters contribute little to the resolution of any of their difficulties. The Shaggy Man and his young friends only do one clever thing, using the Love Magnet in the Valley of Romance; it's the King of the Fairy Beavers who figures out a way to cross the Deadly Desert, to breach the Barrier of Invisibility, to defeat Conjo the mischievous wizard who wants to take over as the Wizard of Oz.

Lastly, Snow clearly reread Emerald City because the characters use the Nome King's tunnel from that book... and the King of the Fairy Beavers defeats Conjo the exact same way Ozma defeated the Nome King in Emerald City. It's boring and anticlimactic.

I already complained about the Shaggy Man; on top of that, Twink and Tom are surely the least interesting "American kids whisked to Oz" in all the Famous Forty, below even Zeb. I don't think they did anything striking in the entire book. Bring back Peter and Bob Up!

My five-year-old said they enjoyed it... though I also think they got a lot less excited about it than some other Oz books we've read of late. I also don't like that Snow has many short chapters, as opposed to Baum and Thompson's somewhat fewer but longer ones. If you do one chapter aloud at a time, it means you move through it somewhat slowly, and very little seems to happen. Boy did it drag.

But that's it for Jack Snow, who made just two contributions to the Famous Forty. Next we get someone new again!

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Valley of Oz

Reading The Magical Mimics in Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Magical Mimics in Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

After John R. Neill died, the Oz series took a rest for a couple years, but it returned in 1946 with The Magical Mimics in Oz, by the series's fourth author, Jack Snow, and third artist, Frank Kramer.

Originally published: 1946
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2024

Jack Snow was the first person to be a bona fide Oz fan to write an Oz book, and you can tell; it's the kind of book where characters do things like say, "Oh, wasn't the Forest of Burzee where Santa Claus was raised?" so that you know the writer has read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (Although, weirdly, he gets the Guardian of the Gates confused with the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. Rookie mistake!) He was also specifically an L. Frank Baum fan; while Neill built on what Thompson had established, Magical Mimics doesn't reference any characters or concepts from after Baum; you could go straight from Glinda of Oz to Magical Mimics without missing a beat. And actually, it would read pretty well; Baum always included some minor characters from the last couple books in his most recent book's celebration scenes, and Lady Aurex from Glinda shows up in this book's. But if you are reading in publication order, Glinda was twenty-six years ago, so the odds are very much against you remembering her! A lot of minor characters that Thompson and Neill hadn't cared for pop up here in minor roles, like Button-Bright and Cap'n Bill. (I did add in a reference to the events of Runaway when reading aloud though; it fit quite naturally into one of Scraps's scenes.)

The premise of Magical Mimics is on the darker end. As always, someone is trying to take over Oz, but it's one of the more successful attempts, like Thompson's Wishing Horse. The Mimics are shapeshifters who want to invade Oz, but can't because of a spell of protection cast by Queen Lurline when she enchanted Oz. What they figure out, though, is that they can replace people who came to Oz after the spell was cast, so when Ozma and Glinda leave Oz on state business, they sneak into the Emerald City and replace Dorothy and the Wizard. Dorothy and the Wizard wake up in prison in Mount Illuso, the Mimics' home, while the residents of the Emerald City go increasingly concerned about Dorothy and the Wizard's strange behavior.

To be honest, I kind of wanted something more creepy and more complex, with Mimics slowly replacing Oz character after Oz character, while some other characters desperately tried to figure out what was going on. As it is, the book is pretty simple: the Mimics replace Dorothy and the Wizard, the other Oz characters wonder why they're acting weird but don't really make any progress or discoveries, meanwhile the real Dorothy and the Wizard meet a fairy who explains everything to them, she takes them back to Oz, and she defeats the Mimics. But perhaps Jack Snow knows his audience better than I do, because my five-year-old kid was totally on edge and nervous even with this very limited threat posed by the Mimics. They did not like that the Mimics replaced Dorothy and the Wizard, and did not like the tense chapter where the Mimic horde invaded the Emerald City and replaced everyone. So I guess it had enough jeopardy for the target audience!

Overall, I thought it was fine. I wish there had been more clever problem-solving by the Oz characters. Much like a Thompson novel, ironically, this one mostly sees the main characters stand around while a previously unknown powerful magic user takes care of everything for them. Dorothy and the Wizard don't do anything interesting to get away from the Mimics; the Emerald City characters don't do anything clever to figure out what the Mimics are up to. Toto turns out to be the real MVP of the novel, instantly realizing Dorothy has been replaced, evading capture by the Mimics, and striking at the Mimic King and Queen when everyone else is paralyzed by indecision. (The Scarecrow also shows some minor cleverness, admittedly, delaying the Mimics until Ozma and Glinda return to deal with them.) Thompson never did much with Toto, so it's nice to see him do some interesting stuff. Snow has the kind of languid pacing Baum often did, as opposed to the frenetic pacing of Thompson and Neill; Oz may be in danger, but Dorothy and the Wizard can still spend two chapters looking at a garden! Snow also captures a lot of Baum's sense of whimsy; both Pineville and the Story Blossom Garden feel like the kinds of places he might have thought of, not Thompson.

I'm sorry to say, though, that not only is Frank Kramer in third place for Famous Forty artists (thus far), it is a very distant third. There is an occasional nice picture (the one of Toto as Sherlock Holmes is fun), but overall most of his illustrations seem to aspire to competent at best. Baum hit gold with both W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, so it's sad to see the publisher scrimping this time around.

Next up in sequence: John Dough and the Cherub