The Latest Oz Reading

Yeah, I'm still catching up on what I've read recently. This is the comic book edition!

• Oz Annual: Patchwork Girl from Zenoscope sees Queen Dorothy having to deal with the dangerous criminal Patch and her bug companion escaping not only Ojo prison, but Oz! The tornado they summon to destroy the prison also transports her to Kansas, where she uses her powers to turn people into lifeless rag dolls to go on a spree. To step her, Dorothy's heading home! Yeah, like most of Zenoscope's Oz books, this is a weirdly warped mirror of the "real" Oz, but at least they seem to be digging into the books for inspiration now. Patch is truly creepy, and Dorothy has to make some hard choices to deal with events. And we get some nice flashbacks to her time in Kansas before she went to Oz.
• The Legend of Oz: The Wicked West #21, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, continues the story of the Wild West version of Oz now that Queen Ozma has been restored to the throne. One of her first decrees is that Gale must turn over the enchanted guns, which does not go over well at all. Oh, and then there's the looming threat of the Nome King to worry about as well.
• Tribute: L. Frank Baum is a comic book autobiography of—well, you can probably guess from the title. Because of the low page count, this is necessarily brief and doesn't cover much of his life in depth. But they do touch on just about everything he did in his life, not just The Wizard of Oz. It's mild and harmless, but also needs to be taken with a grain or two of salt.
• Cthulu Invades Oz, another Kickstarter success, is just what it says on the cover. What's intriguing about this is that it starts off with Dorothy in Kansas, convincing Cthulu to invade Oz so as to distract it from our plane of reality! It only gets worse from there, as we see the results of the Old Ones taking over Oz in a series of short stories, spread out over several months. The magicians and wizards do their best to keep them at bay, but Cthulu finds allies in Oz as well. The final result is surprising, but then Dorothy comes and presents Cthulu with some surprising options of what to do next. I'll just drop the name of the follow-up book, revealed on the final page: Cthulu Invades Wonderland.