The first question is whether the world needed another comic book revisionist re-imagining of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The second question is whether the fact that this is precisely what the public domain exists for is worth supporting such works even though most of them suck in predictable ways. The third question, and probably the only important question, is whether the book is any good.
Dorothy from Illusive Arts Entertainment collects the first four issues of the fumetti-style comic book, starring Catie Fisher and written and illustrated by Greg Mannino, Mark Masterson, and Theo Panousopoulos.
Dorothy Gale is an unhappy sixteen-year-old girl living on a Kansas farm with her aunt and uncle after her parents' death five years ago. Full of sixteen-year-old angst, Dorothy sneaks out on a stormy night, hotwires the truck, and gets swept up in a cyclone, landing in a strange land, where she meets a hostile flying monkey, an electronic dog, a brown wrinkled alien who gives her a pendant, a dragon, and a strange animated burlap-and-denim being with Manute Bol's proportions, who has vague memories of being someone else.
It's played straight, with a strong commitment to its own vision of the character and setting. I appreciate its sincerity. While the overall shape of the plot is mostly intact, the details are strongly variant. For example, Dorothy is not trying to get home; she's far more of a traditional fantasy quest character, who's prophesied to save the blah blah blah.
She also doesn't kill the Wicked Witch of the East, which make her encounter with Glinda awfully contrived. I also think that killing the Wicked Witch on arrival forces Dorothy to engage deeply with Oz from the beginning; without that, she can remain detached and uninvolved, which lowers the stakes.
I'm not entirely sure that the Scarecrow needed an origin (he's given one in one of the later Baum books, I think, but it's not nearly as significant as Nick Chopper's origin). I read some of his origin as tying into the back story of The Marvelous Land of Oz, which is kinda cool. Indeed, there are plenty of Oz references throughout--Dorothy mentions a pet chicken (Ozma of Oz), and Oz's two moons are Ev (Ozma again) and Ix (Queen Zixi of Ix).
The photo art is pretty good. Catie Fisher makes a good Dorothy. The attitude of a punk teenager works surprisingly well for Dorothy; Baum's protagonist was proto-feminist, decisive, and unflappable. Add being pissed off at phonies and you've got a punk teenager. The Scarecrow's different and effectively alien. The monkey's terrific. The red boots are a cute touch. On the other hand, making Glinda a wrinkled brown Gray is weird.
There are some flaws in the art. After landing in Oz, Dorothy complains about the state of her new t-shirt, in a photo in which her t-shirt shows no particular damage. The depiction of her subsequent wounds are overexaggerated. The cuts the monkey gives her don't bleed nearly enough (and she's going to have ugly scars on her face if she doesn't get some stitches). And without a trauma center, the grotesque forearm wounds she's shown with after the encounter with the dragon would cost her the arm, if she didn't bleed out altogether.
As for those three questions: 1) No; but this isn't the bad kind of revisionist, which tries to make you embarrassed for liking the original; 2) No; while supporting the public domain on principle is a good thing, that shouldn't lead to blind support of things that take advantage of the public domain, especially if they suck; 3) it's not bad; it's perfectly readable, with plenty of interesting things to look at.
Overall? It's fairly generic fantasy with Ozian trappings on a scaffolding of tWWoO. Fumetti is unusual enough to generate some interest on its own, especially given the possibilities of technology. Catie's an interesting lead. It's worth a look, and the price, $14.95, is quite good for a hundred or so pages with high production values.
Posted by Greg at March 17, 2006 12:24 PM