Monday, April 12, 2021

Quadruple Your Oz Pleasure

Volume Two
Volume Three
Volumes Two and Three of Marvel Comics's Oz: The Complete Collection bring you loads of Ozzy fun and adventure.

Volume Two contains the full comics adaptations of Ozma of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. 

Volume Three contains the full comics adaptations of The Road to Oz and The Emerald City of Oz.

I adapted the scripts from L. Frank Baum's classic children's book series. Skottie Young drew all the artwork. Jean-Francois Beaulieu colored it all. And Jeff Eckleberry lettered it all. These four stories were previously published as comic book series and as single volume graphic novels. Oz: The Complete Collection brings you two stories per volume.

Volume One of Oz: The Complete Collection is also still available. I posted about it earlier here.

While Ozma of Oz is perhaps my favorite of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, I want to say that I loved Skottie's and my adaptation of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the fourth Oz book. While it was the first of our adaptations to not become a best-seller, I felt Skottie brought a renewed energy to the art and to the bizarre and menacing characters that infest the story. Baum wrote an unsettling, surreal journey featuring vegetable people who walk on air and live in a city of glass, a land of invisible killer bears, and silent wooden gargoyles with detachable wings. The creepy weirdness just doesn't stop till Dorothy and friends reach the Emerald City, where all the old familiar Oz weirdos conduct a ridiculous murder trial. Does that sound too odd, even for Oz? Well, you can see it all in glorious full color in Volume Two of Oz: The Complete Collection.

Skottie Young cuts loose with the character design in The Road to Oz, particularly at Ozma's spectacular birthday party. I love Skottie's version of Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter. We stopped with the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz. If any spot was a logical place to stop adapting the Oz books (if one isn't going to adapt all forty), that one's it. But I still wish we'd been able to continue beyond six books. 

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