The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum illustrated by Graham Rawle book trailer

I saw this book listed several months ago when I was looking over at Soft Skull’s website and thought it looked well . . . soft skully, as they continually have a very interesting catalog of material.

Graham Rawle’s illustrated The Wizard of Oz fits right into that, and I just recently ran into the trailer for this book.

    
If you’ve been following my reviews of Marvel Comic’s OZ adaptation by Shanower and Young, you know that I’m a big fan of the mythos in general.

    
Synopsis:

The story is the same, and yet it’s entirely different. In this fascinating reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, artist Graham Rawle has stripped the epic story about Dorothy’s journey to Oz of all remnants of Hollywood iconography. Gone are the Judy Garland braids, the Technicolor ruby slippers, the ethereal Glinda the Good Witch. In their place, Rawle has fashioned graphic-novelesque characters and scenery that are at once relentlessly modern and also devoutly loyal to Baum’s original text: The Wicked Witch of the West ‘has but one good eye’ and it is ‘as powerful as a telescope,’ while Emerald City only appears to be green because the inhabitants are made to wear tinted glasses.

Infused with color, images, and montages that bring the classic story alive all over again, this is an Oz that is both surreal and surprising – just as it should be.

    
Over at his site, Rawle has a big a pictorial “Making of” that’s pretty interesting to look at.

Rawle also has some images from the book up:

    
Maybe more weird than cool, but I’m thinking this may be the beginning of the Old Weird movement.

    
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