Eric Shanower

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I got this to write a paper about it a few years ago, but never sat down and read it properly until I was recovering from surgery last year-- it was a good choice for that. It's a really interesting kind of adaptation, and one you can only do in comics, in that it is simultaneously completely faithful to the original and wildly divergent. The marketing material and Shanower's preface and afterword explain how the adaptation show more honors the original text, and indeed it does, down to including (a shortened version of) Baum's own introduction to the novel before the story begins properly. This establishes the book firmly as the work of L. Frank Baum from the first page, as does the cover, which privileges his name significantly over those of the two people who actually made it!

The graphic novel renders a lot of textual details other adapters haven't bother with, and even uses Baum's own narration to populate the narration boxes. Sometimes Eric Shanower's script overdoes it, such as with the bit where the Good Witch of the North does a spell to find out what Dorothy should do to get home. I'm sure there's no other adaptation that bothers with the spinning-hat-transforming-into-a-slate bit, but Shanower's captions are largely redundant here-- I feel like he's not trusting the art enough. This is from (I think) the first issue, though, and I'd guess that Shanower hadn't yet learned just how incredible an artist Skottie Young is. They obviously develop an amazing working relationship with time, but here it was early days still. Young is a gifted artist who comes up with amazing character designs that capture the spirits of the characters. For example, I love how he depicts the Cowardly Lion as a giant ball of fluff.

But like I said, the comic can be both faithful and unfaithful at the same time. The divergences come from the visuals. In the original novel, illustrator W. W. Denslow's Tin Woodman is all straight lines and gleam. Young's Tin Woodman, on the other hand, is often hunched over and has very small eyes in very deep sockets, making him seem eternally depressed, which fits with Baum's depiction of a character who regrets even stepping on an insect, yet it is very different from Denslow's, who looks perpetually cocky and pleased with himself.

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

So the book is maybe not as pure as it claims to be, but this is not a bug, it's a feature. Shackled to Baum's depictions but freed from Denslow's, Young is free to do some magnificently imaginative work that captures the glory of Oz in a different way than Denslow did. The comics medium especially allows Young to bring out some of the violence implicit in the original text. Baum would commonly depict very macabre happenings in a very matter-of-fact way. In the original novel, the Tin Woodman is cursed so that he cuts off his limbs one by one, but he doesn't make this sound very distressing at all: "the axe slipped all at once and cut off my left leg. This at first seemed a great misfortune, for I knew a one-legged man could not do very well as a wood-chopper." Young includes a flashback that brings out the horror of the event. In this version, the Tin Woodman's matter-of-fact language comes across as emotional distance from what must have been a great trauma. Even in silhouette, it's horrifying-- there's blood and shit flying everywhere!

Similiarly, contrast Denslow's take on the Woodman's fight with the Wicked Witch of West's wolves to Young's. One will give you nightmares. One will not. One shows the triumphant aftermath of the battle, sanitizing it. One shows you its darkest, most horrific moment. This both is and is not there in the original text, and when Young draws it in this way, it allows him to be faithful and unfaithful at the same time. Even when the illustrations aren't particularly violent per se, he can still capture some of the violence through textbook use of the "gutter": when the Tin Woodman kills a wildcat, we don't actually see the wildcat's head get chopped off, but thanks to the way Shanower and Young panel it here, we imagine it a lot more vividly than we do in the Baum and Denslow version. As Scott McCloud would say, "To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths."

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

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

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, show more 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. The weirdness of its characters is fundamental to my enjoyment of the Oz books, and my favorite panel was one where you just see all these weirdos lined up and the Gump comments, "none of you seems to be constructed any more artistically than I am." 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.) show less

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 show more and even has an ISBN.

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!) show less

The Fables series got a touch kitschy in this volume, even though it is clear that they were aiming for a farcical take on superhero comics. Unsurprisingly, Pinocchio, the comic book obsessed child (who claims he's got the maturity of an adult, but has yet to prove it), is the ringleader of the Fables "Super Team" who shall vanquish Mister Dark once and for all. His assumption is that if you lump together a bunch of people with some sort of supernatural power, put them in silly spandex show more costumes, and give them cliched superhero alias' they are sure to triumph.

Anyone in touch with reality (which surprisingly the Fables series usually tries to perpetuate) knows that Mister Dark can't be defeated by anyone but a peer, that is to say one of the "great powers" who are ideas personified into the world. Obviously these characters are few and far between, but it was mentioned in one of the previous volumes that the North Wind (aka Bigby's father) is one of these great powers, yet he's not even considered when the Fables try to come up with some sort of strategy. He may be a royal pain in the a**, but they could have at least asked, since he has a certain fondness for his grandchildren even if he doesn't really like the rest of the Fables community.

I wasn't very impressed with how quickly the battle with the Dark Lord happenned, and how easily he was vanquished. The solution was obvioius to me long ago, so instead of beating around the bush and creating doomed teams of superheros the Fables should have been capable of figuring it out too. At least Mister Dark is gone (he was a bit too predictable for my tastes), and some new plotlines were revealed. It seems that Miss Sprat has almost gotten what she wants, but we'll see if her newfound beauty will miraculously change her cantankerous personality. I'm also curious to see what happens with Bliss, Beauty and Beast's baby. Obviously she has inherited her father's curse, since Beast is now fully human, but it doesn't really seem fair to saddle a baby who can't find her true love until she's grown up some with a curse like this. Though maybe her changing abilities will be completely natural and less curse-based? show less