Saturday, July 25, 2009

The latest Oz reading

I just finished my reading of Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz last night, and I'm still very impressed with this book. It's not just that this book has all of the 1904-05 Sunday comics pages in it — both Baum's and Denslow's — in their original forms and with the original artwork. It's not just that the comics are in color. It's that it has all that — for the first time — in their original sizes as well. It's not quite the largest Oz book I now own in area, but it's pretty close. I've already read the stories before, a few times, so this was just a cursory reading, especially the background material on Baum, Denslow, Walt McDougall, Oz comics. The John R. Neill material was also a nice bonus, but now I want a collection of "The Little Journeys of Nip and Tuck"! Any fan of Oz or L. Frank Baum who can afford this book should get it. We've needed this for years, and now the technology is available for it to actually happen. The only additions I would have made would be the original headers from the Philadelphia North American, which I gather were also Ozzy and drawn by McDougall, and Denslow's Father Goose comic pages, of which I gather there were only two. So get this book. The price tag may scare some collectors off, but it's worth it to get this material all in one collection.

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