THE READING RHEUM: THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (1900)

 

At the time Baum's WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ was published, the adult fantasy genre had arguably just been launched, however uncertainly, by William Morris in the decade before his death in 1896. Adult fantasy got off to a slow start in the early twentieth century, but juvenile fantasy had already enjoyed many successes in the Victorian era. Baum's immediately successful book was the first major American fantasy-work, although Great Britain was not slow to follow up with the more complicated genesis of Peter Pan, whose earliest iteration appeared in 1902.

Like most contemporary readers I'm only familiar with the well-known works of juvenile fantasy in this period. Still, I think it's likely that most such works were episodic, like the earlier ALICE books by Carroll. There are many unifying themes and tropes in WIZARD, but I emphasize that for everyone who first experienced the classic 1939 film, one will not find the strictly linear structure of the Hollywood effort. 

The biggest discrepancy I noticed on this re-read is that the title is something of a misnomer. As in the movie, the Wizard of Oz is a humbug who only satisfies the wish-dreams of Dorothy's companions with benign trickery, but who utterly fails to get Dorothy home. Dorothy's Silver Shoes, the legacy of her accidental slaying of the Witch of the East, possess the same inherent power as the movie's ruby slippers: to get her back home immediately. The movie's good witch Glinda withholds this information from the protagonist, but in the novel, the unnamed Witch of the North, who succors Dorothy in Munchkin-land, does not seem to know this. In response to Dorothy's tearful desire to get back to Kansas, the North-Witch transforms her cap into a magical slate, and the slate advises, "LET DOROTHY GO TO THE CITY OF EMERALDS." Note that the oracular slate does not actually tell Dorothy to seek out the Wizard of Oz; that's the North-Witch's interpretation of the message.

Of course the true "wizard" behind the narrative wants Dorothy to go to the Emerald City so that she will encounter all of her "magical friends." Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and Cowardly Lion, whatever their assorted limitations, are all male and thus make reasonably formidable protectors for Dorothy and Little Toto on her journey. Certainly they are more efficacious masculine presences than the Wizard himself. Neither Baum nor the 1939 movie ever justify the Wizard's claim that he will solve his petitioners' problems if they slay the Witch of the West. But since the Wizard's mainly concerned with protecting his reputation with his subjects, the logical suspicion is that he doesn't really expect the four travelers to accept the task.

Dorothy's three buddies make an impressive stand against the Witch's allies-- wolves, crows, and bees-- but this just forces the sorceress to use her ace in the hole: the flying monkeys, who decimate both the Woodsman and the Scarecrow while abducting Dorothy, Toto and the Lion. A protective spell from the North-Witch ensures that the Witch can't kill Dorothy, so she turns her into a serving-drudge (not sure how different this is from the little girl's Kansas chores) while trying to bend the Lion to her will. (I don't think anything is said about what protects Toto.) It's only when Dorothy is in the Witch's power that the latter realizes that the little girl has the Silver Shoes, so the dried-up old crone tries to steal them. It's at this point that the Witch's imposition of hard chores backfires. Baum's text only says that there's a bucket of water nearby in the kitchen when the Witch trips Dorothy and steals one of her shoes. But since the Witch's dried-up nature is explicitly said to forbid her touching water, it's implicit that Dorothy filled the bucket in order to mop the floor. Though Dorothy has disavowed both any desire, or any ability, to kill anyone, the theft of one Silver Shoe, the only thing she still possesses, enrages her into hurling the water, killing the sorceress.

Through an involved set of circumstances, Dorothy gets the right advice not from any magical entity, but from an unnamed soldier of Oz, who speculates that maybe Glinda, Witch of the South, can help her get to Kansas. Arguably the real purpose of this secondary quest is to make sure all of Dorothy's friends will prosper once she's gone. The now-brainy Scarecrow has already succeeded the absent Wizard in ruling Oz, and in the process of seeking Glinda, the now-courageous Lion finds a forest where he can rule, and the Woodsman expresses a rather belated desire to become the ruler of the Winkies in the West-Witch's former domain. Once this is done, Dorothy wishes herself back home, albeit losing the Silver Shoes in the process. She returns to gray old Kansas, where her uncle has even built a new farmhouse to replace the one lost to Oz-- though in later books, Baum would eventually have his young protagonist move permanently to Oz and leave dull Kansas behind.

Though Dorothy is always presented as a thoroughly average little girl, she fulfills the role of "the reluctant hero," who transforms the lives of her friends and of an entire domain, even though all she wants to do is return home. It's interesting that even though the protagonist does need male protectors, the female Witches are the real repository of knowledge in Oz, and in a symbolic sense Dorothy really is a witch-in-training, acquiring the weapons of her opponents, even though she uses them to set others free from tyranny. In this she reflects an ethos which, while not exclusively American in nature, definitely reflects the reformist American ethos at the time of Baum's authorship. At this time I've read none of the Oz sequels, but I would expect that many of the author's favorite themes and tropes continue to take interesting forms.

NULL-MYTHS: THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR (1985)

 

By coincidence, this null-myth suffers from the same symbolic deficiency as the last one I reviewed here, WONDER WOMAN: WAR OF THE GODS.  Said deficiency might be called "the shoehorn problem," in which the creator becomes preoccupied (whether out of personal taste or from business considerations) with shoehorning so many disparate elements into the narrative that none of them possess any individual charm. But whereas as a multi-crossover work like WAR OF THE GODS had to tie into a dozen or more other DC comics features, the raconteurs behind this 1985 project-- plotter E. Nelson Bridwell, scripter Joey Cavalieri, and artist Carol Lay-- might have been able to trim away a lot of the extraneous elements in order to allow the strictly necessary characters some room to breathe. (To be sure, the project's editor was Roy Thomas, so based on his eighties writing, he too might have thought that "more is always better.")

Right off the bat, the project-- henceforth abbreviated to OZ-- has to work with a team of seven main characters, the members of "Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew." This group of anthropomorphic animal-superheroes debuted in 1982, written by Roy Thomas and penciled by Scott Shaw, and the OZ storyline was originally intended to appear in the regular magazine. The feature was cancelled, so the idea of the Zoo Crew countering a threat to both the fantasy-lands of L. Frank Baum's Oz and of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland became a stand-alone opus. The narrative consisted of three issues published in 1985, just one year before Captain Carrot's world of humanoid animals would be expunged (however temporarily) by the Crisis of Infinite Earths.

I should note here that I was not a fan of CAPTAIN CARROT at its best moments, for its creators tried to walk a tightrope between adventure and humor, and succeeded in neither arena. At most I experienced a mild liking for the design of the group's "Thing," a big porcine crusader named Pig Iron. But all the others were tedious in the extreme. If they weren't just blandly designed and poorly characterized-- Captain Carrot, Rubberduck, Fastback and Little Cheese-- they also had horribly punny names like Yankee Poodle and (ugh) Alley-Kat-Abra. So on top of finding deeds for all seven of these comical crusaders to accomplish in the narrative proper, Bridwell and Cavalieri-- possibly working to Thomas's specifications-- had to find a rationale for the beast-heroes to go adventuring in both Oz and Wonderland. Further, while the title seems to suggest a literal martial conflict between those two fantasy-domains, the truth is that there's just one evil overlord, the Oz-derived "Nome King," who's attempting to subjugate both realms.

I won't dilate upon the plot, which IMO is just a patchwork of episodes in which the Zoo Crew jaunts from one fantasy-realm to another for this or that forgettable errand. This extremely loose structure allows the writers to work in numerous characters from Baum and from Carroll, which might have worked out well if Bridwell or Cavalieri had shown any ability to continue the witty characterizations of such figures as the Mad Hatter or Dorothy Gale (who appears in OZ, though there's no accounting for Alice, the feminine muse for Wonderland). But the writers might as well have been attempting to emulate stock figures for a D&D game. As with the regular ZOO CREW comic, OZ is astoundingly unfunny and underwhelming in the adventure department.

Carol Lay's art is OZ's only saving grace, for her successful tightrope-act consists of rendering all the beast-heroes in typical bigfoot style, while the Carroll characters are all rendered along the lines of illustrator John Tenniel and the Oz characters follow the conceptualizations of illustrators Neill and Denslow. And there's one decent joke at the end of OZ, for after Captain Carrot has returned to his home from defeating the Nome King, the story ends with him getting yet more barely-welcome visitors: DC's klutz-heroes The Inferior Five. Their appearance is just a nod from Bridwell, since he wrote the Five's series, which I think is probably more fondly remembered than Captain Carrot even though the former didn't even rack up twenty issues. Frankly, since Bridwell seemed in my opinion more comfortable with writing the Five's baggy-pants comedy, a Five crossover with the Zoo Crew might have stood a slightly greater chance of being funny. 

I suppose that one other positive aspect of this project is that its concentration on Oz-mythology-- a necessary result of the multitude of Oz-books compared to the two canonical Carroll tomes-- might make some readers want to sample the Baum canon.