Please view my reviews of the previous issues for my thoughts on them, and general overview fluffery that comes with looking at installments of anything that deal with concepts and characters that have any amount of history. You may also want to see my interview with series writer Eric Shanower.
This issue naturally continues where we left off in the last, and retells the story of Dorothy and her friends making their way back to the Emerald City after defeating the Wicked Witch of West, fulfilling their end of the bargain they made with the Wizard. It is a bargain that we know wasn’t struck in the best of faith. To start with the continued visual reimagination of Oz, the art in this issue is perhaps my favorite – in a series that’s consistently been visually stunning – since the second issue. I think it’s due to the number of different environments Young is able to flex on here: from the trek back East, to the skies of Oz, to experiencing a flashback to the reign of a northern Princess, to a return to the not-so-Emerald city. A Kevin Smith might say that this series has even more walking involved in it than even an Oxford professor would care to traverse, so it speaks to the art’s ability to endear us that we still want to see an adventure most of us have already participated in. There is a particular scene that makes calling on field-mice for help seem much more exciting than it has any right to be, and partially it does so by being an example of the principle difference of Baum’s book and the Garland film – Dorothy is an unwavering catalyst throughout out this story. She is the hero, not just tagging along aimlessly on an adventure. She never fails to show up, from slapping a lion in her path to calling a humbug a humbug. It is the clarity of a child applied even, evenly, in a strange land.
What has separated these episodes of walking throughout the series are what I think the most interesting – to read and in their implementation – bits in the books are the recollection scenes that have served mainly for character origins and finding place for material that was largely not mentioned, and entirely not seen in the film most of us are familiar with; the information that probably serves as our memory default on the subject of Oz. It is in these segments that the art is able to push variance in mood and atmosphere in and on top of our story, and where the writing is able to turn that into volume, into history, thus developing both character and setting into something more than the stocks that the immense popularity and power of the mythos may have made – may have left – them in our minds. In this issue we get a recounting of the history of the subjugation of the winged-monkeys and the origin of – now Dorothy’s – golden cap that can command them. It was created by Gayelette, a powerful sorceress and princess from the North, and used as a part of a judiciary decision that spared the lives of the winged monkeys for an affront she felt committed against her due to a joke played on her husband. The way the situation is presented is interesting as the monkeys seem to carry no animosity toward the princess who created the cap, and who essentially – at first – was perfectly willing to sentence them to death. With the cap, Baum puts the potential of blame in the user – in people – and not the technology or perhaps the wealth itself (the cap is made of rubies, diamonds and gold). Indeed Gayelette gifted the cap to her husband who used it in the best way to keep the monkeys from ever drawing his wife’s ire again– he simply commanded them to stay away from her.
First, stand upon the left foot and say “Ep-pe, Pep-pe, Kak-ke.”
Then, stand upon the right foot and say “Hil-lo, hol-lo, hel-lo.”
Finally, stand on both feet and shout “Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!”
These are the instructions to summon the winged-monkeys, and it was very nice to see Young clearly adhere to them visually as Dorothy calls upon them to take her and her companions back to the Emerald City.
The account of the winged-monkeys, and later the revelation of Wizard’s story made me confront an realization about OZ that I never truly considered until I revisited the story via this adaptation. I never truly thought of OZ as part of the tradition that I enjoyed in say something like Catherynne M. Valente’s Tiptree award winning novel Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden. The appreciation there, like here, is in the sharing of those individual stories, and for us to marvel at how the world weaves them into the one story we are experiencing at the present. We can literally stumble into figurative collections of stories on the shortest of walks. In this series there is natural and easy acceptance of others – of stories – that I know would come off now as too innocent, even unrealistically so, but we should never stop appreciating the ideal or thought behind the lesson itself.
Shanower and Young are bold in simplicity. The simplicity is beautiful.
- Jay Tomio
Jan-ken-pon is the time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column of Jay Tomio, owner of 1/3 of everything you see currently on screen, and the editor of Heliotrope. Some call him the Bodhisattva.
