Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz serves as a reminder that fanboy obsessiveness can be used for good as well as evil: somewhat appropriately, Sunday Press offerings are squarely on the side of angels. Not only in terms of how the turn-of-the-20th century newspaper strips are reproduced —actual size (resulting in a renewed interest in the broadsheet format, and the current trend of books that turn the coffee-table-book format on its head, as they themselves can substitute as coffee tables), with signs of aging technologically removed, with the original printer's imperfections remaining — but also with context-providing supplementary text.
Like the Scarecrow and Tin-Man & Co.'s visit to America, which is the centerpiece of the book,
Queer Visitors finds publisher Peter Maresca venturing into foreign territory. While his previous Winsor McCay and Frank King books were solid strip collections of canonical cartoonists (his
Little Nemo in Slumberland — So Many Splendid Sundays is essential for any classic comics buff who can swing the price tag),
Queer Visitors to the Marvelous Land of Oz is a miscellany. It contains the titular1904-1905, 27-installment serial written by Oz creator L. Frank Baum and drawn by Walt McDougall (not-quite-as strips: contributor Eric Shanower calls the mixture of text and art a "comics page");
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrator W.W. Denslow's rival strip,
Denslow's Scarecrow and the Tin-Man (both he and Baum owned the rights to the first book); and a sampler of other strips by the two artists. It also has a couple of comics pages by John. R. Neill, whose illustrations are probably the ones that spring to mind for fans of the original books, as he illustrated 39 of the first 40. (Because of popular demand, Baum wrote 14 Oz books in total, plus some short stories. After his death, the series was taken on by other authors, primarily Ruth Plumly Thompson.)
The rest of
Queer Visitors contains biographies, historical essays, criticism, and vintage press clippings: cartoonist Eric Shanower does double duty with a survey of Oz comics adaptations and a history of the Baum/McDougall strip.[1] Though he is a professional Oz fan[2] — for example, he is currently writing Marvel's Oz comic, with Skottie Young handling the art — Shanower is scrupulously critical: he includes information such as the fact that "McDougall claimed that Baum ‘totally failed to produce, having no pictoral talent;"' and bluntly states "
The Queer Visitors stories are far from Baum's best writing." He notes discrepancies in continuity between the serial and the books (in the books, the series' events basically never happened): most intriguingly, rather than being cut off by a deadly desert, in the serial Oz is located in outer space.
In fact, much in Baum's and McDougall's "Queer Visitors From the Marvelous Land of Oz" serial seems alien: the visitors, i.e. the Scarecrow, the Tin-Man, the Saw-Horse, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Woggle-Bug and their sentient flying transport, the Gump, are much more accessible to contemporary readers than the 1904-1905 America, complete with racial stereotypes and caricatures, that they encounter. (McDougall's rendering of Dorothy, whom they happen upon, is blank and stiff in a way that none of the other characters, human or inhuman, seem to be: he may have been suffering an anxiety of influence, because according to Shanower, he was drawing from the performance of the actress that portrayed her in the stage adaptation.)
Sometimes, this alien quality can work to the serial's advantage, such as when the visitors who cannot be hurt by the sting of hornets stir up a nest, and then curiously watch as a nearby farmer is driven away, or when Baum is offering a bit of social commentary. McDougall, a pioneering-but-nearly-forgotten cartoonist, does more than his fair share to get the travelogue element across. With details such as drawing exactly the right kind of wallpaper, he does a grand job of depicting and differentiating the cityscapes and landscapes through which the Ozians wander. (Judging from his other, non-Oz cartoons included in the book, such as a
Mad Magazine-worthy full page depicting a European village completely overrun with, and selling out to, American tourists, and a nine-panel 1929 strip in which the changing placement of the landscape creates the equivalent of a tracking shot, creating a milieu seemed to be a particular strength of his.)
There are other things to like about the serial, too: the coloring is gorgeous and the reproduction is fine enough that you can see the texture created by the printer's distribution of ink; the Gump, a flying sofa with a talking moose head attached, humorously whining that he wants to go home in every panel he appears in; an occasional turn of phrase by Baum: "‘Let us all become beautiful, then we need not worry about our looks'"; the "What did the Woggle-Bug Say?" contest at the end of every installment. (It was a contest in which children would look for clues in the strip, and then some would win a cash prize for a correct answer. Maresca thoughtfully included the answers, for those in 2009 who would be unable to identify "the man-made cascades of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition.")
Still, "Queer Visitors" never gels. Baum and McDougall struggle with the layout: the first compromise, in which the story is told in a text block at the top right of the page, while the events unfold in strip form underneath, divides the reader's attention, and later on, the text is just dumped in the middle of the page, framed by McDougall's panels. McDougall's crying children are grotesque, and as Baum's attention begins to wander away from the Ozians, crying children feature more frequently. ("The Two Wishes" installment, however, in which the moral boils down to "it's OK to be mildly naughty sometimes," works a bit better than most, with Baum telling a refreshing story and McDougall seeming to delight in the unrepentant grin of the cookie-sneaking, not-so-good brother.)
Denslow's competing text-and-illustration comic page,
Denslow's Scarecrow and Tin-man, often eschews backgrounds altogether for blocks of color. However, since both artists had to work with characters with unusual physiognomy such as fixed expressions (for example, Jack Pumpkinhead's head is a jack o' lantern), a mastery of body language was needed for expressiveness. In this, the way that Denslow depicts the weight and movement of the straw-stuffed Scarecrow — loose-ankled, flex-toed, head thrown back, leading with the chest and calves — is unparalleled. Coupled with the Scarecrow's darker garb, the eye is drawn straight to him on every page in which he appears. (McDougall's Scarecrow cannot compete, although McDougall does do some fine business with the empty tips of his gloved fingers.) Denslow's Billy Bounce strip, which has nothing to do with Oz, is probably the most accomplished bona fide comic strip in
Queer Visitors, with some fine physical tomfoolery regarding a boy in an inflatable suit and his polar bear buddy.
Though I can't see this book being of much interest to those who aren't fans of the classic novels, it's a fascinating peek into a time where Baum's creations and the visuals of Oz weren't inextricably linked to the 1939 MGM film, when a cartoonist and illustrator could make enough money to buy an island (as Denslow did), and when some of the best books in the Oz series were yet to come. That said there's something resilient and contemporary about Oz, in its constant reinvention: the best moments in
Queer Visitors occur when friction is created when Baum takes an "American fairy tale" and places it directly in America.
Notes:
[1] A Baum bio by Kathleen Kull reveals that Baum and illustrator Denslow had to partially pay to print The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, because publishers balked at the price of the lavish format and the expense of 34 color illustrations.
Image credits:
Digital Restoration [©2009 Sunday Press Books], all other art [©L. Frank Baum, W.W. Denslow, and Walt McDougall]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz serves as a reminder that fanboy obsessiveness can be used for good as well as evil: somewhat appropriately, Sunday Press offerings are squarely on the side of angels. Not only in terms of how the turn-of-the-20th century newspaper strips are reproduced —actual size (resulting in a renewed interest in the broadsheet format, and the current trend of books that turn the coffee-table-book format on its head, as they themselves can substitute as coffee tables), with signs of aging technologically removed, with the original printer's imperfections remaining — but also with context-providing supplementary text.
Denslow's competing text-and-illustration comic page, Denslow's Scarecrow and Tin-man, often eschews backgrounds altogether for blocks of color. However, since both artists had to work with characters with unusual physiognomy such as fixed expressions (for example, Jack Pumpkinhead's head is a jack o' lantern), a mastery of body language was needed for expressiveness. In this, the way that Denslow depicts the weight and movement of the straw-stuffed Scarecrow — loose-ankled, flex-toed, head thrown back, leading with the chest and calves — is unparalleled. Coupled with the Scarecrow's darker garb, the eye is drawn straight to him on every page in which he appears. (McDougall's Scarecrow cannot compete, although McDougall does do some fine business with the empty tips of his gloved fingers.) Denslow's Billy Bounce strip, which has nothing to do with Oz, is probably the most accomplished bona fide comic strip in Queer Visitors, with some fine physical tomfoolery regarding a boy in an inflatable suit and his polar bear buddy.
