Sunday, May 28, 2017

This Week's Oz Short Story

Not so much a short story, actually, as an inventory/reaction to the little miscellaneous bits from the 1978 edition of Oziana that make these early issues so much fun.

  • A cover of Glinda and friends looking through the Great Book of Records by Bill Eubank.
  • Eubank also contributes another in his series of "Oz-E-Gags" (i believe the last in the series). The panel is split in two, with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion reading Star Wars while R2-D2, C-3PO, and Chewbacca are reading The Wizard of Oz. (Remember, this was 1978, and Star Wars had only been playing in theaters less than a year at that point—but it was still playing in many theaters even that late, that's how big it was back in the day.) The caption says, "It seems that this human meets three weirdos, and goes off to fight the forces of evil — oh, there's a wizard, too." Funnily enough, it's not explicitly stated which half of the panel the caption is referring to.
  • Edith Hollister contributes a John R. Neill word find, made up of characters introduced in the three books he wrote. This was the first I'd heard of many of these characters, but based on the pencil markings in this issue, I must have found them all.
  • Harry E. Mongold's contribution to this issue is a poem about Coo-Ee-Oh called "How Ducky!" with a very evocative illustration by Dave Billman.
  • This is the only issue I can recall of Oziana with an insert: A piece of sheet music called "Scraps, Ditty" where Clara Jean Curzon puts music to one of Scraps' songs from The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Hmm, I've had this nearly forty years but never found someone to play it for me (I'm not musical myself).
  • Another picture by Dave Billman, this time of Ozma.
  • And a back cover by Lau Shiu Fan illustrating an incident form this issue's story "The Woozy's Tricky Beginning".
This means that, yes, next week, I start looking at the 1979 issue!

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