Maps and More in the Fall 2024 Baum Bugle

The latest triennial issue of the International Wizard of Oz Club’s Baum Bugle is the 200th. It’s arriving, wrapped in seasonal colors, at club members’ houses now.

I’m honored to be one of the contributors to this issue, in the midst of many Oz experts I like and admire:

• Ruth Berman on the launch of the club and its journal.
• Scott Cummings on a stage show that would have reunited L. Frank Baum with his first illustrator, the since-famous artist Maxfield Parrish.
• Peter Hanff on the work of longtime Bugle editor and art director Dick Martin, with more samples of Martin’s work from David Maxine.
• Memories of editing the Bugle in different periods from Bill Stillman, Michael Gessell, and John Fricke.

My article is about the maps of Oz and its neighbors published in Tik-Tok of Oz in 1914—how they came about and how they affected Baum’s storytelling in the novels that followed. Up until that book, Baum had never mentioned any maps. Afterwards, every book alluded to the map of Oz in one way or another.

That essay owed a lot to two studies of Oz and its representations. First, Michael O. Riley’s Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (University Press of Kansas, 1997) snapped me out of the childhood habit of thinking of Oz as a stable place that the books gradually revealed and empowered me to think of Baum making it up as he went along. To be sure, by the time I read that book I’d studied literature in college, edited books for a decade, and even published my own fiction. But old habits stick around. Now I find it more interesting to analyze the fairyland from multiple perspectives.

Starting in 2012, David Maxine has shared a series of essays about the maps of Oz through the Hungry Tiger Press blog. This analysis starts with the earliest map, made for a theatrical presentation and now lost, and has worked its way to the Oz Club’s 1960s publication of maps that incorporated locations from the whole series and other Baum books as well.

Like other Oz fans, I enjoyed looking at the 1914 maps I first saw in Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz. I had the Oz Club’s maps pinned on the bulletin board in my room for years. As many other fantasy authors and publishers discovered after Baum, there’s nothing like a map to make a fairyland seem more real.

“Finding Friendships: Middle Grade Comics” Panel at MICE 2024

The Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) takes place this weekend in the Fuller Building at Boston University, 808 Commonwealth Avenue.

MICE has been in that building for the past few years, but this is the latest the show has been scheduled, in the gift-buying season.

On Saturday, 7 December, I’m going to moderate a panel discussion at MICE titled “Finding Friendships: Middle Grade Comics.”

The four panelists are, in alphabetical order with their middle-grade books:

• Johnnie Christmas, Gamerville and Swim Team.
• Debbie Fong, Next Stop.
• Emma Hunsinger, How It All Ends.
• Shaina Lu, Noodle & Bao.

One thing that struck me in reading these creators’ work is how they all came to middle-grade storytelling from different directions.

Christmas was one of Margaret Atwood’s collaborators on Angel Catbird and drew or wrote other adventure comics for adults like Tartarus and Alien 3. Fong illustrated prose books for young people, including the YA anthology Banned Together. Hunsinger was best known for her short comic “How to Draw a Horse,” published in The New Yorker. She’s also co-created a picture book, My Parents Won’t Stop Talking. Lu is an educator here in greater Boston whose projects included a community mural in Chinatown.

It’s usually easy to see connections from these artists’ earlier work to their new books. For instance, Lu’s Noodle & Bao is about gentrification in an urban neighborhood. Hunsinger’s How It All Ends and “How to Draw a Horse” both start with sharing adjoining desks in a high-school class.

I interpret this confluence as a sign of the strength of the market for middle-grade graphic novels in recent years. Agents and publishers drew in talent from all directions, and we have a wider range of stories as a result.