The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Graphic Novel)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Graphic Novel)
The premiere American fantasy adventure gets the Merry Marvel treatment! Eisner Award-winning writer/artist Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) teams up with fan-favorite artist Skottie Young (New X-Men) to bring L. Frank Baum’s beloved classic to life! When Kansas farm girl Dorothy flies away to the magical Land of Oz, she fatally flattens a Wicked Witch, liberates a living Scarecrow and is hailed by the Munchkin people as a great sorceress…but all she really wants to know is: how does she get home?
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Beautiful, beautiful visuals for a story that isn’t as good as you remember
The artwork in this book is beautiful. Skottie Young has a talent for crafting images that are stretched far enough from reality to be fascinating but close enough to retain a humanity and warmth, and this classic story lends itself to that. Shanower comes across as someone who loves Oz and wants to present as faithful a representation as possible, but unfortunately, that means including awkward 1900 dialogue and some mystifying plot elements (the Scarecrow is going to be stuck in a river forever! except he isn’t, and that tension is resolved after about two pages.). I appreciate this work for what it is, and I look forward to a hypothetical future where this creative team develops new Oz stories with contemporary concerns and literary sensibilities, but the dialogue and plot of this collection make me hesitant to recommend it to any contemporary reader who is not already a fan of both Skottie Young and the original book.
5 Stars Review of Shanower’s Wizard of Oz
Wonderful! Shanower again impresses me. I cannot say how accurate the adaption is, but I must insist that this is a grossly entertaining comic, with very sympathetic characters. Also of interest are the drawing at the back, which outline the process of the artist as he decided precisely how to illustrate the characters.
5 Stars L. Frank Baum would approve!
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!
5 Stars Review by worldoflil.com
For me, the best work of adapting Baum since the original film came out. Skottie Young is one of the best young artists in the business. He has a whimsical, yet surreal style and you can get caught up in his artwork as much as you can the story - a very competent adaptation by Shanower. This is appropriate for any child, or any adult who has not yet grown up. Men, women, boys, girls - doesn’t matter. The best illustrated book to hit the market in quite some time.
1 Stars a failure
I have no idea why this is so highly-regarded: I think it’s a complete failure.
Now, kudos to the writers for doing a version of the first Oz story without at all referencing that MGM film. But that doesn’t mean it’s any good. Baum’s material was unsuited for this medium.
One gets the impression that the artists wanted the source material to be far more nightmarish and freaky than it really was, since that’s what they apparently wanted to draw. Baum’s material was lighthearted, but the way they’ve rendered the story casts a feeling of gloom over everything to the point where there’s this disjoint between the words you’re reading and the tone of the illustrations you’re looking at. The panelling, especially, is unsatisfying: action scenes are cramped, visually wondrous scenes are given short shrift, and the characters’ expressions are inappropriately exaggerated at times, annoyingly underdone at others.
Also, the artist has watched one too many Hayao Miyazaki films. It’s like he shoehorned Miyazaki’s style into this story. The result is a miscegenation.
Filed under: Top Graphic Novels