Old-Fashioned and Modern: Dorothy Gale Goes Comics
This book was conceived and commissioned by Byron Preiss Visual Productions, which probably means it was done on the cheap. A nice consequence of that approach, however, is that it gave a young artist the chance to create his "first novel-length work for a major publisher."
Cavallaro hadn't read Baum's text before this job, but he was quite faithful to it. The only omitted episode is the visit to the China Country (which Baum probably added to his manuscript after the first draft). Most of the dialogue and narrative captions come directly from the book. There's little evidence of the MGM movie looming over this vision of the story.
Nevertheless, throughout the book there's a tension between Baum's original text and Cavallaro's visual adaptation of it more than a century later. The first page says, "In our solar system...on Earth...in America...in the midst of the great prairies"--the last phrase echoing Baum, the first three hinting at today's wider perspective on fantasy lands.
Dorothy lives "in a place called Kansas," but she also lives in an urban townhouse. She wears jeans, sneakers, and a studded belt. She speaks in old-fashioned cadences: "I'm sure Aunt Em will be dreadfully worried over my being away so long." But she has a young adolescent's spindly body and the big-eyed visage of anime heroines.
The Tin Woodman has a buzz saw for one hand, making an ax redundant. A detail like that is usually a hallmark of a "dark" adaptation of Oz, but this tin man's character is as kind as ever. Similarly, the Scarecrow wears (is partly made of?) a zippered sweatshirt, the Winkie soldiers have dog tags, and the Wicked Witch of the West's magical cap is a chic turban. But their characters are as Baum created them.
All in all, I thought the mix worked just fine. I especially liked the variety of panel frames and layouts that Cavallaro used to translate Baum's story into dramatic visual form. A budding comics creator could get a lot of ideas from these pages. And the last 26 of the book's pages share a sample of Cavallaro's sketches and notes.
