The Illustrious Illustrators of Oz

What does Oz look like?

For most people it probably looks like the MGM movie, perhaps with a dash of Broadway’s Wicked thrown in.  And in a few short months, if Hollywood dreams come true, the upcoming Sam Raimi movie might just redefine Oz for a whole new generation.  But those of us who grew up with Baum’s books have a whole different perspective.

Even if you’ve never picked up an edition of The Wizard of Oz, you’ve probably seen some of the original illustrations by William Wallace Denslow.  They’ve appeared on greeting cards, calendars, and stamps; on mugs, keychains, and t-shirts; and they pop up whenever a magazine does an Oz retrospective or analysis (a surprisingly frequent event).  Even though Denslow’s  short, stolid Dorothy is not as ubiquitous as Judy Garland’s, she’s still carved out a niche for herself in popular iconography.  Here’s a random sampling:  http://theworldofoz.webs.com/apps/photos/album?albumid=10624283

In order to get the full Denslow experience, you really need a facsimile of the original edition.  Its highly wrought color scheme and beautiful color plates were something of a sensation in their time and are still impressive now.  Plain black and white editions don’t do them justice.  But even the most cursory Google search will turn up examples of Denslow’s template-setting Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion, as well as his bizarrely pigtailed Wicked Witch of the West.

The fact remains, however, that Denslow illustrated only one Oz book – albeit the most famous.  He and Baum fell out and went their separate ways before anyone realized that Wizard marked the beginning of something big.

Would Denslow have been so quick to go solo if he’d known?  We can’t say.  Go solo he did, though, with the fateful result that a young man called John R. Neill was hired to illustrate the next title, The Marvelous Land of Oz.  http://www.johnrneill.net/intro.html  Neill seems to have had a taste for regular paychecks, because he went on to illustrate twelve more Baum Oz titles (plus several non-Oz Baums), all nineteen of Ruth Plumley Thompson’s, and three more that he wrote himself.  It was and is a genre-defining achievement, by far the greatest and most comprehensive visual exploration of Oz ever, and one that gave us indelible images of such beloved post-Wizard characters as Ozma, the Patchwork Girl, Shaggy Man, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Wogglebug, the Sawhorse, Polychrome, and countless others.  Neill is a rock star.

His style couldn’t have been more different from Denslow’s.  Where Denslow tended toward the short and stubby, Neill tended toward the long and flowing, with strong echoes from the aesthetic movement.  He was more versatile, too.  His non-human characters are endlessly inventive and delightful, and his renderings of Oz architecture are spectacular.  For many Oz book fans, Neill’s Oz is the ultimate Oz, the true Oz – and yet, because he did not illustrate Wizard, he is little known outside the Oz fan world.  It’s a sad irony.

I love my Neill.  There are areas in which I take issue with him, though, not least of which is his tendency to make boys look like chorus girls in drag.  He didn’t start out this way.  Boys figure prominently in Land of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and Sky Island, and they’re perfectly fine.  But starting with Patchwork Girl of Oz, we get a sudden infusion of pretty that’s above and beyond the call of aesthetics.  Scroll down this page http://vovatia.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/everythings-coming-up-ojo/ for a particularly awful color plate of Ojo the Lucky with his friend Button-Bright – who just happen to be the boy heroes of MY stories.  It rankles me!  Nevertheless, Neill is our man and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.  Where would Oz be without him?  Thanks for everything, John R.!

The Shocking Secret of Oz

Since the days of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, fantasy worlds have been designed with an eye toward continuity and consistency.  Each one operates according to its own internal logic and its own set of natural (or unnatural) laws, which, ideally, remain the same from the beginning of a series right through to the end.

Oz is not that kind of fantasy world.

As I’ve said before, L. Frank Baum didn’t set out to create a series at all.  Rather than writing variations on the original Oz book, he preferred to add fresh new books featuring fresh new worlds, each one distinctly different from the last.  Why bother to remember what you did before when you can do something completely different?  Ix, Mo, and Noland are just three of the many worlds he created.  None of them caught on the way Oz did, however, and eventually Baum’s fandom made it clear that Oz was what they liked best.  Baum met their wishes – but he did not give up his ways altogether.  The result was that Oz became something of a continuous creation, its rules and details subtly (or not so subtly) improvised from book to book.  The Oz of Wizard is a very different place from the Oz of his own later books such as Glinda Of Oz.  Rules change.  Origin stories are adjusted or replaced – perhaps ignored, perhaps even forgotten.  If consistency is truly the hobgoblin of small minds, Baum’s mind must have been vast indeed.

The upshot of all this is a confusing legacy for later Oz writers.  Which rules do you obey?  Can you patch together a unified framework?  Is it even worth trying, when the author himself seems not to have bothered himself over it?

Each Oz author comes up with his or her own answers, and each answer inevitably complicates the situation for the next author to come along (which raises a whole new tangle of questions regarding canon, for goodness sake).  Some of us tie ourselves in knots trying to make it all fit, or we engage in endless, often heated, discussions in Internet chat rooms.  Me, I like to see the matter as a gift rather than a curse.  If Baum didn’t feel tied down, then neither do I.  Give me some wiggle room and I’m there!  In fact, it’s fair to say that my first two stories pop right out of interesting gaps that Baum left behind.  Got a mystery you can’t solve?  Pull out your laptops, folks, there’s a story in it!

On the other hand, I do try to stick to my Baum, for better or worse, and Thompson fans will not find any of her characters in my stories (though I have found it necessary to throw in a reference or two here and there).  I also prefer to elaborate on ideas he underused or gave up on, rather than inventing totally new worlds within his worlds.  And finally, I’m ridiculously proud to have a place in my friend Joe Bongiorno’s Royal Timeline of Oz http://www.timelineuniverse.net/Oz/Mainlinetimeline.htm  So perhaps I’m not quite as laissez-faire as I pretend.

Next time:  The Illustrious Illustrators of Oz, a brief introduction to Oz artists.

My first post on my first blog!  I never thought I'd see the day.

This blog is all about my upcoming Oz book, The Law Of Oz, and other stories, due to be published in time for the next convention of The International Wizard Of Oz Club.  In future posts I'll have a few things to say about how I came to write the thing, and I'll also introduce my wonderful illustrators.  But fasten your seatbelts, folks, because I'm going to start with a brief history of the Oz series for the uninitiated.

If you only know Oz from the MGM movie, as well as Wicked and The Wiz, you may be surprised to know that L. Frank Baum -- the author of The Wizard Of Oz -- wrote no less than thirteen sequels!  This was not something he planned.  Wizard was a great success when it was published in 1900, so much so that a Broadway musical version quickly ensued and made stars out of the actors who played the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman.  All this success led to a second Oz book, which led to a third Oz book, which finally led to an ongoing and lucrative series.  Oz acquired a new ruler, the lovely Princess Ozma, and both Dorothy and the Wizard ended up making their homes in the Emerald City.  A great many new characters were added as well.  By the time Baum died in 1919, the tradition of an annual Oz book under the Christmas tree was firmly established.

Not wishing to abandon the series, publisher Reilly and Lee quickly hired a new author -- Ruth Plumley Thompson -- to continue it.  Thompson ultimately contributed nineteen Oz books, a record for Oz authors, and the characters she invented are still loved by her fans.  She was busy writing Oz stories when the MGM movie came out in 1939.  And the story does not end with her.  The tradition of the yearly Oz book was allowed to slip, but sporadic titles by a number of different authors -- including Oz's primary illustrator, John R. Neill -- continued to emerge.  The last of the Reilly and Lee titles, a 1963 outing called Merry Go Round In Oz, rounded out what Oz fans call The Famous Forty.

Oz, however, had acquired a life of its own -- on film, onstage, and in print.  With or without Reilly and Lee, Oz writers went right on extending the series.  Some of their stories were never published, some were published privately, and a few were published by other houses.  There are Oz collections out there that would boggle your mind.  They certainly boggle mine.  Alternate Oz universes have also proliferated in books, in comics, and on screen.  Though Wicked is the greatest and most famous of these, it's hardly alone.

Many of us, however, remain solidly in the Baum (or Baum/Thompson) Oz-verse.  I'm a bit of a Baum purist myself (though Oz fans who read my stories may find occasional nods to his successors).  That's not to say that I keep things exactly as he left them -- far from it.  But all my ideas grow straight out of his books.  And I, too, am hardly alone.  We Oz authors are everywhere!

That's my thumbnail history.  More Oz later!