Fred
Wizard of Oz book

With many new announcement about the wizard of oz movies in the news, you might want to consider starting to obtain Wizard of Oz book series either as collectible or investment.

I can’t get the graphic between “Wicked” and “Son of a Witch” to load, what is it?

Huh. How odd. It should; it’s a standard jpeg loaded on the CBR server, same as all the others. Anyway, it’s a shot of Gregory Maguire and a woman I don’t know, standing in front of a poster advertising the Broadway adaptation of “Wicked.”

LATER… Well, that’s weird. It looked fine in Mozilla but in Explorer I can’t see it either, not even on the original page I stole it from. So I switched to a different Broadway image. We do a full-service column here at CSBG!

You skipped the HBO TV series Oz. Definitely a case of Adaptation Decay.

One of the problems is, it’s (perceived as) easier to make an adaptation of something than to create your own charaters and situation. And since it’s in the public domain you don’t have to make your main character “Dora Wind” or something, you can actually call her Dorothy Gale so everyone gets what you’re referring to.

AIR Moore wanted to use the real Charlton characcters for Watchmen, but was vetoed because they were being
integrated into official DC continuity; hence the pastiches.

Otherwise, I think you’re right on the money!

http://www.wowwiki.com/Wizard_of_Oz

But the no-nostalgia bit is hard, without long breaks in publication and availability. The Silver Age wasn’t stuck in nostalgia, because the kids of 1960 hadn’t read comics (or existed) in 1940.

Super-hero comics haven’t been in that situation for along time now. We can get the Watchmen/ Dark Knight deconstruction, or the Powers/ Identity Crisis/ All-Star Batman ‘adult’-ification with rape and swears and dismemberment, or the Busiek/ Waid/ Ross nostalgia-plus-better-storytelling-and-art -than-in-the-old-days (I think All-Star Superman is one of these– and I’m not knocking it, my favorite books are often in this category). But it’s hard to get something unselfconscious, something that isn’t in part a story about comics’ relationship to their past and a commentary on the Silver and Bronze Ages. Sandman wa sgenuinely original. Starman synthesized darkening and nostalgia in an original way, when nostalgia was a specialty taste rather than the dominant theme. Morrison’s X-Men was an original *kind* of commentary on the past, but hardly a fresh and forward-looking start.

And now that comic book movies and even TV-animation understand that keeping the fanbase happy and excited is very important for good buzz and enthusiasm, it’s hard for those other media to be free of the nostalgia-winks– with Superman Returns as the reductio ad absurdum.

The old knock on the super-hero genre was that it was only capable of telling fight stories, even if these pretended to be mystery stories or morality tales. Now I’m afraid that it’s becoming incapable of telling stories that aren’t about itself.

It would hold more water if the chronological order of some of these hadn’t been rearranged to support the flow of the argument…

Do you mean the Shanower? That’s a reprint of older stuff, that cover is of the trade collecting them but the work’s well over 20 years old. Likewise with Lost Girls, the collection’s new but that strip was originally serialized almost twenty years ago, I think in Taboo. I might have goofed up on the order of some of the indie Oz revamps but honestly I don’t know that the order matters that much there.

It just seemed to me that you placed the order of photos in a “best of” to “worst of” manner, so it really didn’t make sense to have what was essentially the same work in one level of quality or presentation and then say what was essentially the same material just continued further at a different publisher was that much worse.

Putting that aside – Are publishers stuck producing marginalized materials? Well, I think I can agree that the comics industry has tied itself into a proverbial Gordian Knot of sorts. But are they stuck doing that? No. It’s just that whenever someone comes along and tries to cut the rope, the party is either ignored, or they get noticed so everyone else follows suit and turns what could be the cutting of the rope into yet another knot instead.

The only way to break that, is to have a publisher who truly understands publishing and isn’t concerned about a corporate agenda or figuring out ‘niches’ to fill, and just wants to produce a solid line of products. Then, the fans and retailers have to accept that stance at face value and support it.

Until you have that, you will continue to have the marginalisation of the genres and of the medium in this business.

Meanwhile, some people do the reconstruction and make it something that can appeal to kids, like the Marvel Adventures or Enchanted (I can’t really take anyone seriously who lumps that one in with Fables). So, instead of a simple two points of “original and childlike” and “adult and shock value”, we have a pair of axes, with one line going from original to reconstructed, another going from childlike to actual adult, with deconstruction and shock value somewhere in the middle. And then the actual works get plotted in all places on the graph.

From the comic books above Bloodstained Oz and Dorothy Gale Journey to Oz looks interesting.

I have to disagree with you, Chris. Let’s use Batman as an example.

You can find enough pseudo-Batman characters and Batman fan fiction out there regardless of the copyright. One can assume that as long as someone wants to write a story featuring Batman, whether they intend to write a detective story or an S&M story, they will find a way to do it legally or otherwise. Nobody will stop you unless you intend to profit from it. In fact, with Elseworlds and other mini-series there have been multiple, all officially licensed, interpretations of Batman. This is already similar to your panel review idea, except for the lack of independence. I think it would more or less produce the same results that we already have, because ultimately this “independent” panel would be owned by DC.

But why would a company WANT to open itself up to allowing the publishing of unauthorized versions of their characters? Sure, there’s revenue there, but quality control is something that is far more important to most companies than squeezing that last dime. While we can debate for hours if DC or Marvel really has a grasp on “quality” (Devin Grayson’s writing suggests otherwise), the last thing DC, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Disney, or any other company wants is a bunch of people making unauthorized S&M statues of their characters. Because frankly, too much “deconstruction” and “reimagining” will undoubtedly flood the market and dilutes the property, and to use Oz as the example, generally produces more crap than gold. Read some bad superhero fan fiction and ask yourself if this would really produce enough revenue and/or acclaim to justify an official release, or would it just dilute the property. I say the latter.

My suggestion? If someone wants to write a story about Batman and can’t use Batman, simply make up a Batman-like character. It worked for Alan Moore with “Watchmen,” and I’d say those characters are currently part of the public consciousness far more than the original Charleton Action Heroes are (I don’t see a Blue Beetle or a Question movie on the horizon). I think people are just pigeonholed into the idea of wanting to write a superhero story with Batman when if their ideas really are a strong they can write similar stories with their own original characters that the public will recognize as basically Batman stories, even if he lacks the big symbol on his chest.

On the Alan Moore note, keep in mind that the man is also capable of writing something like Supreme. He turned the character from an XTREME Superman into a character that more or less was the Silver Age Superman. He certainly knows how to work against his “Lost Girls” type.

Returning fairy tales to something more akin to a horror tale, making them stories for adults? That -is- the circle closing.

Before the Victorians moved in to give fairies their current tiny winged sprite image,they were mercurial, mischevious, occasionally malicious creatures. In the same way, fairy tales were neutered down into their current sparkly, happy ending, kiddy-story form.

The original fairy tales were dark and gruesome (see: Snow White’s stepmother dancing at her wedding in red-hot iron shoes; Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilating their feet to fit the shoes; Sleeping Beauty raped in her sleep by a necrophiliac prince). Heck, look at Hansel and Gretel; the witch is baked in her own oven, in a fit of karma for all the kids she’s already eaten. Those aren’t stories for children, unless you want to give them nightmares.

I really don’t see why you think Dark Oz was ‘missing the point’, when all it was was the continuation of the Caliber series by the same creative team, as well as the LAND OF OZ that Arrow did (which I noticed you didn’t use as an example, because it’s more clean cut to the original material), and also predates most of the stuff you’re talking about.

I thought I was careful to point out that I’m not talking about the relative merit of ANY individual one of these efforts. I’m just looking at trends. I will absolutely and without reservation grant that every single creator involved in every single one of those efforts thinks they’re doing good work, even the Fetish Dorothy guys. Nobody sets OUT to do something bad. I’d even stipulate that most of the people working on the books have tremendous affection for the originals.

As for why the series got used twice — I was just looking for as many different covers as I could find, there’s not that much rhyme or reason to it. There were a lot more besides LAND OF OZ that got left out. The idea was just to show how many different times people have tried it.

That being said, no matter what the relative merit of a particular book is — sure, the Caliber books have merit, Dorothy of Oz is interesting, and I hear Bloodstained Oz is pretty good, actually — but I’m talking about where the books are AIMED. It’s really disingenuous to assert that a book called “Dark Oz,” with a bloodstained yellow-brick logo, and a scene of impending violence on the cover about to be committed by distorted Oz characters, isn’t working the same basic riff as fetish Dorothy. One is sex and the other is violence. But the shock value’s coming from the same place. No number of thoughtful, virtuous text pages in the back of the books are going to persuade me otherwise. Sorry.

And all THAT being said, the point of the piece is simply to suggest that this is happening not just with Oz, but ALL OVER the Marvel and DC landscape. Because the audience has naturally self-selected to the point where the big companies are stuck doing not only a particular genre, but this marginal interpretation of it, over and over, for their bread and butter; the primary audience for the matierial, the one it was DESIGNED for, has migrated elsewhere. So they twist it to make it fit the audience that’s left, and that process is a natural piece of evolution and we’re stuck with it. That’s the idea.

Which I’m not even completely sold on, MYSELF. But I think it has enough merit to build a column around it.

When done well, there’s nothing wrong about them at all.

They just aren’t done well a lot of the time. I don’t know if it’s because the writers don’t have enough distance from what they’re writing about to make good creative decisions or a lack of talent or what.

But I don’t think it’s innately bad. Why not write about something you’re passionate about? It’s like any other genre or subject in the world. Just find the ones that are good and don’t bother reading the rest.

I’m not totally buying the comparison though. We aren’t currently seeing an “adult spin” on super-heroes, we’re seeing a modern spin on them, just as there was a modern spin on them 10, 20, and 30 years ago. He used to be protecting his secret identity from super-villains but now he is also protecting his secret identity from the government.
Comics haven’t stopped, there is no end-of-the-book state so there is nothing that they can be reimagined from. Its all continous.