THE WONDERLAND OF OZ
by Douglas G. Greene
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 1968), pgs. 14–17
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Greene, Douglas G. “The Wonderland of Oz.” Baum Bugle 12, no. 1 (1968): 14–17.
MLA 9th ed.:
Greene, Douglas G. “The Wonderland of Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 12, no. 1, 1968, pp. 14–17.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with multiple examples of the comic that have not been reproduced here. In addition, this article was originally printed with an error that cut off the last sentence. This has been corrected below with an amendment in brackets to provide a complete story.)
“Here they Come! Your old Friends in a NEW Cartoon Serial ‘THE WONDERLAND OF OZ.’” Thus begins the 1932 promotional material for a daily black and white comic strip retelling the Oz stories. The Reilly & Lee Company, publisher of the Oz books, felt that the huge sale of the series could be translated into a popular newspaper feature. Agreement was reached with the C. C. Winnington Company of Detroit to syndicate the series, and Walt Spouse was hired to turn Baum’s stories into comic strips.
Eventually, Spouse prepared five books for “The Wonderland of Oz”: The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Emerald City of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and Tik-Tok of Oz. His work is remarkable for its utter faithfulness to the books that he is picturing. No incients are omitted and there is only one change. After the story of The Patchwork Girl has been completed, the Shaggy Man journeys north to join the adventurers of Tik-Tok. Spouse’s pictures are skillful and highly detailed, based upon John R. Neill’s conceptions of character and incident.
Despite Spouse’s artistic skill and the tremendous popularity of the Oz books, the syndicate experienced difficulty in convincing newspapers to carry the comic strip. By the end of August, 1932, less than a dozen papers had accepted the Oz feature. Eight were in the United States: the Detroit News, Salt Lake City Desert News, Decatur Herald and Review, Arkansas (Little Rock) Gazette, Providence Journal and Gazette, Boston Herald, Newark Ledger, and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. Somewhat surprisingly, three Canadian newspapers also published “The Wonderland of Oz”: the Halifax Herald, Montreal La Patrie, and Quebec Le Journal. A file of the cartoon has been examined in the Philadelphia paper; the Oz feature had a disappointingly short run, lasting from May 9, 1932, through October 6, 1933.
Why was “The Wonderland of Oz” not more successful? Why did the comic strip fail to achieve the popularity of the Oz books themselves? Reilly & Lee cannot be faulted in the amount of publicity which it granted the feature. A colored map of Oz was given free to any child writing to a participating newspaper, and readers could paste the strips into a scrapbook supplied by the publisher. It seems rather that the failure was due to the quality of the strip itself. Perhaps Walt Spouse did too good a job transferring the Oz tales to comic strip form; he reproduced the stories much too exactly. He did not understand that daily comic strips have to have much more action than the books, or the reader’s interest is lost before the next installment appears. “The Wonderland of Oz,” by ignoring this rule, had some extremely dull episodes. For example, it takes Dorothy several installments to walk to Bunbury, and very little occurs in these episodes except countryside.
Although “The Wonderful of Oz” ceased its newspaper appearances in 1933, it was revived in the comic magazine, The Funnies. This publication reprinted the strip in 1938–1940. (Also in 1940, a few episodes appeared in Hi Spot Comics.) There were two major changes. First, Spouse’s art was now in color rather than in black and white. Second, the story was no longer told beneath the drawings (as was the case in the newspaper syndication), but rather in “bal[loon form.”]
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