Oz: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [Hardcover]

Any fan of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz will probably enjoy this. I'm happy reading this book on my own, but it also makes a great bedtime story for my niece.

Skottie Young's charming and colorful art is absolutely stunning. And Eric Shanower, who has become the authority on Baum-to-comic adaptations, embraces the subtle existentialism and philosophy from the original story. Even the social commentary and political interpretations of 'The Wizard of Oz are not forgotten. It looks and reads like the magical and epic fable it is with folklore prose and fairytale illustrations.

One thing I might criticize, is the inconsistent pace. The story begins with a rather slow narrative.. which I find highly enjoyable. You get to soak in the beautiful skill and craft and the nostalgia of childhood fantasy, but towards the end a few things seem a bit rushed. However, it's all still fantastic, and I am pleased with the entire adaptation.

Overall, this book is a great buy, and I recommend it to anyone who likes Wizard of Oz or Comics.

As a long time Oz fan and a bit of a purist, my vision of L. Frank Baum's Oz is tied to the illustrations of W. W. Denslow, John R. Neill, and Eric Shanower, whose style honors the content of the original Oz illustrators yet manages to feel fresh and contemporary at the same time. Frankly, I could not have imagined a different Oz aesthetic that would satisfy as much as the original or a faithful adaptation thereof, like Shanower's Adventures in Oz. This collaboration between Shanower and Young, however, blew me away.

Quite simply, this book is gorgeous and although it breaks the mold, it is a completely convincing new vision of Oz. The script by Eric Shanower does a beautiful job of distilling Baum's prose into the economical form needed for the comic book/graphic novel genre. Yet episodes and details unique to Baum's original text - crossing a river on a raft, meetings with the stork, the Kalidahs, the Hammerheads, the China Country, the Witch's golden cap, are all there. Most importantly Baum's tone, humor, and kindly philosophy shine through.

Skottie Young's artwork is extraordinary. I especially like his Dorothy. Denslow's Dorothy always seemed a bit pudgy and humorless. Neill's is too often insipid and girly. This Dorothy is cute as a button with lots of spunk and emotional range - wonder, awe, fear and rage as appropriate, it's all there. She practically leaps off the page. And she is so winsome that it's easy to imagine why her companions take to her and become her devoted friends. The Tin Woodman has a wonderful mustache reminiscent of either W. W. Denslow or Baum himself. The Scarecrow has a vaguely zombie aesthetic, especially after he gets his pins and needles brains. The Lion looks like a cuddly stuffed toy - until he roars and then watch out! The good witch of the North is a delightful bubble head and the Wicked Witch of the West is truly terrifying. The Wizard looks a simultaneously malevolent and mischievous grandpa with his too short trousers belted high over the bulge of his belly and his glasses that are unfashionably large. Relatively minor characters like the Munchkin with the injured leg and the field mice get a fresh new spin.

The color palette is also a delight to the eye. Baum's color scheme as Dorothy moves through the different regions of Oz is retained but in a subtle way.

If you have any affection for Oz at all, run to your nearest bookseller and buy this book. You will not be disappointed. I'd give it six stars if I could.

I am eagerly awaiting the sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, by this talented team.

What can I say about OZ that hasn't been said before. I must admit that I am one of a generation that grew up with the MGM movie "The Wizard of Oz" being our only exposure to L. Frank Baum's stories. Until the original stories saw paperback reprints in the late 1970's, the OZ stories were unavailable for nearly 50 years except to collectors who could afford to spend ungodly sums to buy battered copies of the original Cupples and Leon hardback volumes. In the 1980s, with the start of the independent comic publisher movement, Eric Shanower began a series of Oz based graphic novels which I did not appreciate because of my lack of exposure to L. Frank Baum's original works. Quite frankly, I was amazed to learn that Marvel comics was producing a new Oz series and dreaded what the company which gave us the "Marvel Zombies" series of dreck would do to Oz. I am happy to say the end result is probably the best thing to come out of Marvel in twenty years! And what's more, I believe that if L. Frank Baum were alive today, he would probably approve of this adaptation. In his life, Baum embraced just about every medium available to him to get OZ before the public, even producing primitive OZ movies on his own. It's kind of hard to fathom, but comic books didn't exist during Baum's lifetime. If they had, I'd be willing to bet he'd have produced something similar to Shanower and Young's wonderful adaptation. The script, by Shanower, is faithful to the original text, restoring Baum's original horrible puns (i.e., "Bran" for the scarecrow's "Brains" mixed with pins and needles to "keep him sharp" and also restore the rather dark humor of the original that was stamped out by MGM's technicolor treatment - Dorothy's presumed mental illness and shock treatments (just as horrible to contemplate today as when Baum wrote of them) were replaced in the movie by a simple bump on the head. But as wonderful and faithful as Shanower's script treatment is, Scottie Young's art is the selling factor here. For the first time ever, an artist has gotten Dorothy right! Even W.W. Denslow, working hand in glove with L. Frank Baum himself, got it wrong. Though Dorothy's age is never mentioned in the text of the stories, she would have had to have been about seven or eight years old to be able to do the things she does in the stories. Denslow drew her as a toddler of about three, far too young to be able to wander about a magical world without any grown-up aid. And what can I say about Judy Garland? As much as I like the MGM classic, I'm sorry, but at 16 she is far too old, too tall, and too buxom to be playing Dorothy. Scottie Young got it right. The only flaw with his art is his inability in keeping track of whether or not Dorothy was wearing her bonnet in a scene, but that's just nitpicking on my part. I wasn't prepared to like his interpretation of the other characters, his scarecrow and lion and tinman being completely different from anything we've seen before. But they work, and after a few panels I forgot all about the differences from his art and my mental picture of how they "should" have looked. This is the best OZ interpretation to come along since the original, and I am looking forward to when Shanower & Young's "Marvelous Land of Oz" is released!

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