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!
