“The possibility of rendering Bryant and Drake’s relationship in a graphic novel”

Looking at the history of the new Charity and Sylvia graphic novel by Tillie Walden might shed light on the brewing controversy over its debt to the older Charity and Sylvia history by Rachel Hope Cleves.

In February 2024, Seven Days reported on the upcoming project this way:

Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, the executive director of Vermont Humanities, first learned about the Weybridge couple [Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant] from [Rachel Hope] Cleves’ book. Then the senior philanthropic adviser of the Vermont Community Foundation, he awarded a grant to the [Henry] Sheldon Museum to sponsor an exhibition of the Bryant-Drake archive and a lecture by Cleves at Middlebury College.

Kaufman Ilstrup saw the possibility of rendering Bryant and Drake’s relationship in a graphic novel. He thought the story of the two 19th-century women, who lived openly as a married couple before the vocabulary existed to describe their relationship, deserved a wider audience. When [Tillie] Walden, who teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, became the state’s cartoonist laureate last year, “it was like a bolt of lightning for me, frankly,” Kaufman Ilstrup said.

He emailed Walden and asked if he could pitch her an idea.

As a marker of how Vermont a story this was, their conversation took place at the King Arthur Baking Company in Norwich.

At the end of that same month, the Middlebury Campus newspaper announced announcing the start of Walden’s residency in that town. (A Bluesky user with the handle Queerkitty spotted this article, which led me to the one above).

The Middlebury article reported:

Tillie Walden, Vermont’s renowned cartoonist laureate, will take up residency at the [Henry Sheldon] museum beginning in May in order to write a graphic novel about the couple’s life. . . .

Walden’s upcoming book will differ from the only previous narration of Bryant and Drake’s lives, “Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America,” written by Rachel Hope Cleves, a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, in 2014. While Cleves used records from places outside of Vermont and focused on the couples’ intimate relationship, Walden will exclusively rely on the Sheldon museum archives to tell the story of Bryant and Drake’s years living together in Vermont, according to Garcelon-Hart.

Walden’s project was commissioned by nonprofit arts organization Vermont Humanities and the Vermont branch of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

There’s no question, therefore, that Cleves’s history led to the graphic novel, with everyone involved aware of the earlier book. The museum’s YouTube page offer Cleves’s lecture from 2022, also supported by Vermont Humanities.

Yet the comic was supposed to be entirely independent of that history book, whether to avoid the issue of derivative rights, to highlight Vermont resources, or to provide Walden with free rein to interpret the sources at the Sheldon Museum.

However, according to Cleves, portions of the comic are based on material not in the museum collection, material she found and described in her book. Walden’s online bibliography acknowledges how she consulted Cleves’s book regardless of the initial plans in February 2024.

The news articles also show how Walden produced her Charity and Sylvia in an amazingly short time: it was just over two years from when she started the museum residency to its publication. That shows what a hard-working graphic novelist can produce with financial support. But that schedule might also have raised the pressure to follow an established narrative rather than develop a new one.

Two Takes on Charity and Sylvia

In recent years, publishers have worked with historians to adapt their scholarly studies into other types of books, more welcoming to teenagers and other regular people, and thus with potential for large and lasting sales to schools.

For example, after publishing Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge in 2017, Erica Armstrong Dunbar worked with Kathleen Van Cleve to produce a Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away, a “Young Readers Edition” published in 2019.

Marcus Rediker initiated collaborations with David Lester and Paul Buhle on graphic novels adapted from his books: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel; Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel; and Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741, a Graphic Novel.

Earlier this month I saw an announcement of Tillie Walden’s new graphic novel Charity and Sylvia, published by Drawn & Quarterly, about a couple in Vermont in the early 1800s. I immediately connected that to Rachel Hope Cleves’s study Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press.

I wondered if Walden had adapted Cleves’s work, or fictionalized it with her blessing. When I shared news of the graphic novel with the Boston Comics Roundtable, I added a mention of Cleves’s work.

Unlike Dunbar and Rediker, Cleves isn’t credited as a coauthor of the graphic novel. In a line inside the book, an online bibliography and discussion of sources, and public talks, Walden cites Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia as a major source. But does that add up to enough acknowledgment for how much she relied on a previous author’s work?

Last night Cleves posted an open letter to readers that says in part:

I've tried to be happy that Walden's book is making their story more widely known, even if she chose to take my title and my cover design as well as my narrative and my research with only a single sentence of acknowledgement at the end of her book in her notes section. Walden's illustrations and storytelling are wonderful, as I told her when she reached out to me during the writing process. It would take nothing away from her hard work to be honest about how it is built on my hard work. But in Walden's publicity tour, she has repeatedly made the claim to have based her book on her extensive research in the archive without acknowledging that her book is, in fact, based on my book. . . .

I don't doubt that Walden spent time looking at letters at the Henry Sheldon Museum, but the story that Walden tells is not to be found there. It is a story that I pieced together from years of visits to at least twenty different archives and locations across the United States, not only in Vermont but in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Washington State, as well. . . . Many of the details of that story which appeared in my book, and re-appear in Walden's, do not come from the Henry Sheldon Museum, where she claims to have done her research. They come from the countless additional archives I visited.

The process of creating a graphic novel is akin to dramatizing a narrative for stage or screen. The script turns narration and analysis into scenes with dialogue. The art builds on descriptions or imagination. Even the most nonfictional narrative comic is a fictionalizing adaptation of its sources.

With fiction, we readily recognize how a graphic novel or dramatization is a derived work. Unless the original story has entered the public domain, the new publication requires contracting for the right to adapt the original, crediting and compensating its author. After all, the story and characters wouldn’t exist without the first author’s creativity.

With nonfiction, the law is less clear. No one has a copyright claim on historical facts. No one can call dibs on the exclusive right to line up events in chronological order. As legal experts often say, copyright doesn’t protect ideas; it protects the expression of those ideas.

In her open letter, Cleves writes: “This is not just a question of facts but of story: the story of how Charity and Sylvia built a life together…” But was that “story” created by the subjects living their lives or by the historian reconstructing those lives in a meaningful form? Is a “story” a copyrightable expression of ideas that survives even when it’s expressed in a different form?

There’s no doubt that Cleves’s research unearthed facts about Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, produced enough detail to build a compelling story, and smoothed the path for future researchers. Unlike the tale of Ona Judge or the 1741 uprising in New York, there are no other books to draw from. So what claim should Cleve have on that subject? Our copyright law protects creative work, but should it also require compensation for hard work?

TOMORROW: Historical roots.

“Expands into a fluffy cloud when microwaved”

In yesterday’s New Yorker crossword puzzle, clue 27 Down was:

Brand-name bath bar that expands into a fluffy cloud when microwaved

I’ve already stated my claim to be the first person to try microwaving bars of soap, or at least the first person to publish the eye-opening results of the process on one well-known brand, in my 1993 book Soap Science.

But I haven’t mentioned that I told that story for a short comic drawn by Dan Mazur in the Boston Comics Roundtable anthology Boundless, edited by Olivia Li, Jordan Stillman, and Neil Johnson in 2016.

That comic includes depictions of me and my dad in the 1970s and 1990s. In fact, the editors told me that the script won them over as soon as it called for pictures of me as a child. 

Ernie Morrison’s Tutor, Miss Zenobia Frierson

I first mentioned that Ernie Morrison had an individual tutor while he worked at the Hal Roach Studio back here.

At that time, I knew that tutor was a black woman. She appeared in a couple of photos that also showed Fern Carter teaching the white kids in the Our Gang movies. But I didn’t know that woman’s name.

News stories about Ernie’s departure from the studio in 1924 reveal his tutor at that time: Zenobia Frierson (her first name also rendered in newspapers as “Znobia” and “Zenovia”). Using newspapers and other information, I’ve assembled this brief profile of her.

Zenobia Evelyn Frierson was born in Texas—probably in 1897, though I’ve seen documents stating the year as 1895 and 1898. She studied at Wiley College in Marshall, a historically black college founded in 1873 by a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church. I haven’t found a yearbook or other document about her studies.

By 1924 Frierson was in Los Angeles, working as Ernie Morrison’s tutor. Under California law, he’d probably needed three hours of lessons on each working day since the fall of 1918, when he’d turned six. Given that Frierson probably graduated from college around that year, she may well not have been his first tutor. But she could have had the job in 1922–24 while Ernie was working on the Our Gang films.

After traveling with the Morrisons in 1925, Frierson returned to Los Angeles, where she married Louis Payton Allen on 15 Sept 1928. He was also from Texas, born in 1882. In the 1940 U.S. Census he was listed as a waiter on a railroad; if that had been his profession all along, he presumably traveled a lot. An October item in the California Eagle, the newspaper of Los Angeles’s black community, referred to the bride as “Mrs. Zenobia Frierson-Allen,” but she soon used only her husband’s surname.

In 1930, Zenobia Allen was living in a rented house on 49th Place in Los Angeles. Census records list her occupation as “secretary” of a “Christian organization.” She was head of a household that included her mother, Marjorie Blye, and a young roomer, Helen Boyd, but no children. Louis P. Allen wasn’t listed as living with them. Interestingly, the actress Louise Beavers and her family lived nearby.

In that decade Zenobia Allen appeared regularly in the Eagle as part of African-American social events. She helped to organize Wiley alumni gatherings. She signed a protest against hiring discrimination at the telephone company. In 1935 she started to work for the Angelus Funeral Home as a “receptionist”—though of course being the first person to speak to grieving families was a position with great responsibility. The photo above dates from 1934 or before.

By 1940, the Allens’ marriage had definitely broken up. Louis was living with a new wife, Inez. She was a manicurist while he worked for a railroad. He died that October.

After World War 2, Zenobia E. Allen gained national visibility as a “supreme epistoleus” of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. In that role she traveled the country and corresponded with Mary MacLeod Bethune.

In 1955, after twenty years at the funeral home, Zenobia Allen moved to work at a local savings and loan. That fall she married Claude A. Jolly, a real estate and investment broker, with her mother looking on. The Los Angeles Tribune reported:

Romance of the popular and attractive Greekletter figure and the prominent businessman came as a surprise to the local community at large, where they are well known…

Unfortunately, Claude Jolly died in August 1957, less than two years later.

Zenobia Jolly continued to appear at AKA sorority events over the next few years, but she appears to have retired by the 1960s—probably comfortably, given her second husband’s wealth. Zenobia E. Jolly still owned real estate when she died in October 1982.

I haven’t found any mention of Zenobia Allen Jolly discussing how one of her first jobs was to tutor and travel with the young entertainer Ernie Morrison. She appears in print simply as a pillar of Los Angeles’s African-American community at mid-century. If she hadn’t had such a rare name, her connection with show business would be invisible.

“The following routine hardly constitutes a ‘vacation’”

In March 1924, for the first time in more than six years, eleven-year-old Ernie Morrison didn’t have a movie to make.

He had no call time the Hal Roach Studio. He wouldn’t spend hours with the other kids he’d worked and played with for the past two years. (Ernie had his own tutor, so at least he wasn’t also cut off from Fern Carter’s studio classroom.)

The end of Ernie’s $250 per working week salary would no doubt affect the Morrison family finances, but not immediately. His father, Joseph, who had run a market before entering show business, evidently invested some of those earnings in what the 17 September New York Evening Journal called “a string of ice cream parlors and frocery [sic] stores in Los Angeles.” In addition, the 18 December Savannah Tribune indicated he owned the Four Brown Candy Factory. The African-American press treated Joseph Morrison as a admirable entrepreneur.

It’s notable that the Morrison family and the Hal Roach Studio didn’t cut ties. Joseph continued to play black men in the movies, performing opposite Gene “Pineapple” Jackson and Allen “Farina” Hoskins in “Circus Fever.” Ernie’s little sister Dorothy Morrison appeared as Farina’s girlfriend in “The Love Bug,” with Joseph along as her father. In 1925 she would make “Isn’t Life Terrible?” with Charley Chase.

In late June, Ernie himself returned to Our Gang unit for a week (at his previous salary) to finish shooting “Fast Company,” a short begun over a year before. (Harold Lloyd’s young brother-in-law, Jack Davis, returned from military school for the same shoot.) That movie proved to be the coda to Ernie’s long Rolin/Hal Roach Studio career, but decades later he still had good things to say about Roach.

An item in the 24 May Colton Daily Courier revealed how Ernie was spending most of his days:

Sunshine Sammy, world famous little comedian and formerly featured player in Hal E. Roach’s “Our Gang” comedies, has a complaint to enter. . . . his father, Joseph Morrison, well known candy manufacturer, promised Sammy a good long vacation. Sammy, in his aforesaid complaint, says the following routine hardly constitutes a ‘vacation’—“Three to four hours a day study under his special teacher, Miss Zenovia [sic] Frierson. One hour violin lesson each day from James B. Warren. Miscellaneous and incidental other hours spent in perfecting himself in fencing, boxing, wrestling and in his ‘spare’ moments he composed a wonderful waltz, “Sunshine Sammy is a Good Old Scout.”

The same newspaper had reported on that waltz back on 3 May, saying “hundred of congratulatory messages” had come for Ernie. That article added:

The fact that he has become a composer of the first rank is only incidental with Sammy’s plans and he will soon spring a surprise on his friends, that will prove momentous in amusement circles.

COMING UP: Big plans.

“They are trying to get along without Ernest Morrison”

As I wrote back here, almost all the other kid-gang comedy movies produced in the wake of Our Gang’s success included at least one African-American kid in the cast.

People viewed Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison and Allen “Farina” Hoskins as vital to the series’ success.

On 4 July 1924 the California Eagle, published for Los Angeles’s African-American community, reported:

The kid situation seems to be worrying that powers that be at the Hal Roach Studio. They are trying to get along without Ernest Morrison (Sunshine Sammy) but the big question is will the exhibitors accept “Our Gang” comedies without Sammy or a Race star other than Farina.

It is rumored that two of the “Our Gang” Series that were made without Ernest were returned from the Eastern exchange marked N.G.

“N.G.” was the standard Hollywood label for bad shots to be discarded.

In fact, Hal Roach had quickly sought out a replacement for Ernie Morrison. In April 1924 the studio brought on Flemon Miller, a black boy about the same age, to appear in “The Sun Down Limited” and “Every Man for Himself.” The Pathé Exchange would distribute those pictures in the fall, but Flemon wouldn’t make much impression on the screen.

The California Eagle went on to drop some inside information:

The Dramatic League booking office received a hurry up call for Eugene Jackson and Eugene has gone to work there and his director is McGowan who directs the “Our Gang” series.

Eugene Jackson (1916–2001) had already acted in a few films, including the feature Penrod and Sam and “An Afternoon Tee” in the rival Reg’lar Kids series (a short which was Johnny Downs’s break into the movies).

The newspaper’s next item noted that another black child actor, James “Bubbles” Berry (1915–1969, shown above), was available after making eight pictures for the Century studio. Those movies, such as “Speed Boys,” were also imitations of Our Gang. But “Bubbles” was made up with white lipstick for a minstrel-show effect, something the Roach studio never did to Ernie Morrison.

The Eagle’s deduction about Gene Jackson was correct: he joined the Our Gang unit at the end of June and made six movies through early 1925. In his 1999 autobiography, Jackson described his beginning this way:

I met with Mr. Roach, and he liked my natural acting ability. I did some impromptu acting, and he said I had an open freshness with a million dollar smile. He conversed with me for a short while, and I signed immediately for a three-year contract. He coined the name “Pineapple” for me in the series, which has been a permanent part of my show business name.

As for Ernie Morrison, Jackson remembered living around the corner from him. Ernie was four years older and busier, so Gene admired him from a distance:

Sammy was such a big star. He was an established star. When he arrived home, the entire neighborhood would could out to see him. He had a great big limousine a mile long.

But now that Ernie had left the Hal Roach Studio, what would he do?

TOMORROW: Training in ’24.

“‘Our Gang’ comedies will be as a ship without a rudder without Sammy”

In the early 1920s, Ernie Morrison was almost certainly the most prominent African-American actor in Hollywood, the only one to appear regularly in movies marketed to mainstream audiences.

What’s more, whether as sidekick to Hal Roach’s adult male comedians or as a leading member of Our Gang, Ernie didn’t really fit inside the dominant culture’s racial stereotypes (despite the studio and the press’s best efforts).

While he often played scamps, Ernie the real-life hard-working actor was also a role model. His June 1922 trading card assured children, “In between his motion-picture work he studies hard at his lessons, and a very great future is predicted for this clever youngster.”

Naturally, Ernie Morrison held special significance for African-Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois’s short-lived magazine for black children, The Brownies’ Book, featured the boy twice while he was still working with Snub Pollard. In 1923 Du Bois visited the Hal Roach Studio with other members of the NAACP. The June issue of that organization’s magazine, The Crisis, included the photo above.

Ernie, clowning with a broken bass fiddle, was surrounded by:

• Dr. Vada Somerville (1885–1972), co-founder of the NAACP’s Los Angeles chapter, first black woman to be licensed as a dentist in California.
• Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963).
• Anita Thompson (1901–1980), star of By Right of Birth from the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and actress in other films.
• Beatrice Thompson (1874–1938), executive secretary of the LA chapter and the actress’s mother.
• Pearl W. Hinds Roberts (1892–1984), pipe organist with a degree from the Oberlin Conservatory, wife of a California assemblyman.

On 28 Feb 1924, around the time Joseph Morrison and Hal Roach broke off negotiations over a contract renewal, the Omaha World-Herald reported that the local NAACP chapter had sponsored a free showing of “one of ‘Sunshine’ Sammy’s photoplays” for more than 200 black children to raise funds to support an anti-lynching bill.

Given Ernie’s profile, the end of his contract with Roach was a big deal for African-American moviegoers. The most detailed reports about that change appeared in the black press. The New York Age article cited here was the first to report salary numbers. On 18 July 1924, the Afro-American of Baltimore ran this item:

SUNSHINE SAMMY LEAVES HAL ROACH

The Hal Roach Studio seems hard put to it these days. Ernest Morrison, nationally known as “Sunshine Sammy” has left the lot.

Mr. Morrison, Sammy’s father, refuses to give any information other than to say that Ernest will be featured in his own company. The “Our Gang” comedies will be as a ship without a rudder without Sammy.

The Morrisons’ contract had ended four months before, but the studio was about to run out of the Our Gang movies Ernie had made early in the year. And audiences viewed black kids as an essential part of the gang.

COMING UP: Keeping busy in 1924.

“Ended an eight-year engagement with Hal Roach”

Ernie Morrison starred in the Our Gang films regularly for more than two years, from January 1922 to March 1924.

The only other movies he made during that time were cameo appearances with the gang in other Hal Roach Studio comedies. He was too valuable to be an adult comic’s sidekick anymore.

Ernie had started at the studio at $100 per week, plus $30 for his father, Joseph Morrison, who played occasional roles for black men. (In the Our Gang series Joseph often played Ernie’s father, though in “Lodge Night” and “Circus Fever” he appeared prominently in other roles.)

By 1924 Ernie was making $250 per week, plus $50 for his father, according to Rob Demoss’s Lucky Corner website. That was the studio’s most expensive contract for an Our Gang member; freckle-faced Mickey Daniels also earned $250 per week, but with no added payment to a parent.

In early 2024, Joseph Morrison asked Hal Roach to increase his son’s pay. According to an article in the 31 Jan 1925 New York Age (published for the city’s African-American community), Joseph asked for Ernie to earn $300 a week.

That article also said that would have been a $75 raise for Ernie, which doesn’t add up. But perhaps Joseph also asked for his own weekly rate to rise by $25, which would be $75 more overall. In any event, it wasn’t an outlandish request.

Hal Roach said no. Roach’s employees liked the collaborative culture and working conditions he established, but he could be ruthless in negotiating salaries, even with his biggest stars.

“Quits Roach,” headlined the 1 Mar 1924 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News over a photo of Ernie smiling; “the child will not sign for another engagement because of financial differences.”

The 16 March Detroit News told readers: “‘Sunshine Sammy’…has ended an eight-year engagement with Hal Roach.” He’d been at the studio for less than five years, but Roach sometimes wrote his contracts to include options into the future.

The 23 March Omaha Morning Bee said: “the cute negro boy screener, has quite [sic] Hal Roach, due to a difference in salary demand on a new contract and may essay a trip into vaudeville.”

Those items appeared in long columns of other news from Hollywood, but other journalists had more to say.

COMING UP: Sunshine Sammy and the black press.

Ernie Morrison before Our Gang

Ernie Morrison was born in late 1912 in New Orleans. About six months later his father, Joseph, moved the family to Los Angeles, where he ran a grocery store.

In 1916, Joseph Morrison later told the New York Age, he “overheard some directors inquiring as to where they could find a clever little youngster.” Another source says the moviemakers were looking for a “little colored boy.” Ernie fit both descriptions. Joseph took his son to the studio.

By age four, Ernie was a regular in the Baby Marie Osborne comedies. The studio behind those films, Diando, even tried to create a new series around Ernie in 1918, using his father’s nickname “Sunshine Sammy.” But the Pathé Exchange didn’t pick up those short movies for distribution.

In August 1919, Harold Lloyd, the only consistently successful comedy star at the Rolin Studio, was badly injured by a prop bomb during a photo shoot. Rolin’s head, Hal Roach, scrambled both to help his friend recover and to find new material to release.

Lloyd’s usual sidekick, the Australian comedian Snub Pollard, was promoted to a lead. In the short “Call for Mr. Caveman,” filmed in September 1919, his supporting cast included a little black boy played by Ernie Morrison.

Roach saw how well Ernie performed. Indeed, his lively personality still comes through on the screen. Envisioning a new series (which, Robert Demoss reports at the Lucky Corner, he unfortunately referred to as “‘coon’ pictures”), Roach signed Ernie to a two-year contract, as shown above. That made the six-year-old the first African-American actor with a long-term movie deal.

However, Pathé still wasn’t interested in a “Sunshine Sammy” series—“not on the basis of racism,” writes Richard Lewis Ward in A History of the Hal Roach Studios, but because the company head felt “‘kid pictures’ were box office poison.”

Instead, Ernie performed as Snub Pollard’s regular sidekick from 1919 to 1921. After Lloyd recovered, Ernie appeared in a few of his films, too, most delightfully in “Get Out and Get Under.” During that time, Rolin was renamed as the Hal Roach Studio.

Roach saw that Ernie Morrison was gaining a fan base. He renewed the contract and assigned the boy to boost the studio’s lesser comedians, such as Eddie Boland and Paul Parrott (brother of Charley Chase and later director for Laurel and Hardy). Ernie was also loaned out for the Neilan adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod with Wesley Barry.

In mid-1921, Hal Roach once again put “Sunshine Sammy” at the center of a picture. In an advertisement to cinema owners (shown here), the studio declared:

Millions have laughed at him, exhibitors have commented upon his popularity with their audiences,…full of pep, a “pip” of a “feeder” to the comedy stars he supported

Now he is starred in one two-reel comedy, made the way Hal Roach knows how to make ’em

Hot Dog! This one isn’t a gamble, it’s just sure to please!

The rest of that ad copy uses broad dialect and racial slurs. The movie itself was titled “The Pickaninny,” though Ernie never fit into that stereotype of a black child. Roach thus offered the Morrisons more opportunity than they would find elsewhere but still played into the racism of the time.

Pathé released that “Sunshine Sammy” comedy in December 1921. It didn’t do well enough to launch a new series. Ernie continued to appear in supporting roles. But he was popular enough to be featured on a Boys’ Cinema trading card in June 1922, posing in top hat and tails with a short biography on the back; most of the other “Famous Heroes” in this series were grown men, all of them white.

Meanwhile, in January 1922 Ernie had started performing in a new series of shorts at the Roach studio—not in support of an adult male comedian, but alongside other child actors and animals. Those “kid pictures” would make him an even bigger star.

COMING UP: After the gang.

Assessing the Ultimate Oz Universe for the Baum Bugle

The spring 2026 issue of The Baum Bugle contains my review of The Lost Lands, the first volume of the Ultimate Oz Universe graphic retelling of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

There’s a big team behind this comic, some of them having worked for years to develop this version of Oz for various media. But the main creators of what we see on the book’s pages are the writers Cullen Blum and Larry King and the artist Mike Deodato, Jr.

My bottom line is that The Lost Lands is interesting to sample as an alternate version of Oz and often visually striking, but sadly not as original as it presents itself.

Firstly, there have been many “dark” adaptations of the Oz books in comics form over the years. The Ultimate Oz Universe is far from the first to recast Dorothy as a teenager, the Tin Woodman as a robot, the Scarecrow as truly scary, and so on.

Second, this graphic novel is a streamlined retelling of The Marvelous Land of Oz. Nothing wrong with that, but the project also draws without acknowledgment on work still under copyright, including later books and the syncretic maps created by James E. Haff and Dick Martin for the Oz Club.

Third, Deodato’s art is notable not only for its dramatic hyperrealism and solid comic-page design but its inconsistency on the details. I spent two paragraphs listing examples, such as:

Over one action sequence, Glinda’s sleeves grow from being short and off-the-shoulder to long and puffy. Mrs. Yoop’s shoes have straps in one panel but not the next. On a single spread, the Cowardly Lion’s belt takes on three separate designs.

Based on such discrepancies, other comics artists have accused Deodato of using AI imagery. He’s denied doing that. (Using AI should have been disclosed during the book’s Kickstarter campaign.) I don’t have hard evidence on that question, so I wrote simply about sloppiness in the visual details.

The overall lack of originality limits how compelling this volume can be. Fans of the Oz books already know the twist at the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz. Seeing the same basic story play out with a teen-aged Tip, a bipedal Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger, and other changes doesn’t make it a different story.

Other articles in thus Bugle issue cover the release of Wicked: For Good, a detailed analysis of the art of John R. Neill, a tour of the Hotel del Coronado, and a look at the Australian textile artist Raquel Caballero’s Ozzy work (showcased with eight pages of color), as well as many other reviews.