In dark Oz stories, the hedonistic “sex, drugs and rock and roll” of the 1960s and 70s morph into sex, drugs and especially violence. The steampunk esthetic is not the essence of dark Oz, but lends detail to these dark worlds. Dee Michel will look at the steampunk esthetic in dark Oz works in various media such as:
→TV: Tin Man (2007), Emerald City (2015);
→Comics: Oz Squad (1991-96), Caliber’s Oz (1994-96); and
→Films, perhaps: Twentieth Century Oz (1976), Return to Oz (1985), Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)
Dee Michel co-wrote a chapter on the Cowardly Lion for The Characters of Oz, in which he compared the Lion’s incarnation in recent *dark Oz* works with Baum’s and MGM’s versions of the Lion. Several of his reviews for The Baum Bugle, the journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club, are about dark Oz novels.
Dee has also written Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love The Wizard of Oz and has given talks on why gay men love Oz, Oz and queer history, the T-shirts of Oz, and Oz in general. His VoiceOver appeared the documentary It’s Dorothy (2025, Jeffrey McHale) and his work has been discussed in The Village Voice, The New York Review of Books, and other print, online and radio sources and in academic works.
A collector of Oz books and related materials since he was a child, exhibits of items from his Oz collection have been seen in academic and public libraries, and as part of a fine art show. Dee has Masters and PhD degrees in library and information science and was on the faculty of the Information School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.