Oz Art to Wish for from Linda Medley

This is one of the most potent images from the Oz book mythos: Dorothy is wearing the Magic Belt and making a wish. Something’s gonna happen. Somebody’s going down.

This illustration comes from Linda Medley, the comics artist best known for Castle Waiting and a long-time fan of the Oz books. It’s one of five greeting cards featuring Oz characters that she just offered on Etsy. The others show Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Wizard, and Glinda.

Medley has also created a print of Ozma, the Wizard, and Dorothy (and Toto, too). Her picture of Dorothy is an enthusiastic little girl, notably younger than Ozma and ready for adventure.

Worth the Waiting?

The good news was that the second collection of Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting was published last fall.

The bad news was that it breaks off in the middle of a storyline, and that Medley asked to have her name omitted from the exterior of the book, hinting at estrangement from the publisher or her own work. (The image at left is a preliminary cover design.) She has put the series on hold, so the wait for volume 3 might be even longer.

The possibly good news is that among Medley’s other projects is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories, focusing on “underused characters.” In a January 2008 interview with du9 she explained:

I rewrote a bunch of Wizard of Oz stories, and I did kind of the same thing I did with Castle Waiting and fairy tales. There’s a lot of things in Baum’s story that are kind of open-ended, and during the three years that I was away from Castle Waiting, I thought: “okay, what if this and that new things happened?” So I actually laid out about nine volumes and started drawing. But I don’t know if I’m actually going to do them because I want to do them in color, and that’s really hard to get, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe I’ll do it on the web or something like that, I don’t know.

By “really hard to get, as far as I’m concerned,” Medley probably meant that her sales record didn’t justify the expense of printing many pages in color.

As of 2006, Comic Book Resources reported, Medley had created “300 odd pages of as yet unpublished ‘Oz’ material,” but put that aside to focus on Castle Waiting. I’ve found no announcement of publication plans.

Whatever work Medley is doing now, I hope that she’s enjoying it.

A Meaningful Pause in Castle Waiting

Back in November, I listed the use of repetitive images to show the passage of time as an illustration technique that's a hallmark of comics, with their multitude of images (and tight deadlines), but rare in picture books.

Here's an example of that technique I enjoyed in Linda Medley's Castle Waiting. In this flashback to bibliophile Lady Jain's childhood, the volume she's reading may even be an Oz book.


Jokes are all in the timing, after all.

When Graphic Novels Aren't Novelistic

In the last few months, as I've doggedly re-explored comics, I've read several "graphic novels" that I don't think deserve that label. It's not that their storytelling isn't sophisticated enough to deserve the respect that Will Eisner was seeking when he coined that term.

Rather, I can't let go of the fact that a novel isn't simply a story long enough that its printed form has a spine thick enough for a title. A novel is an extended yet complete and unified story. It's a single narrative in itself, neither a collection of tales nor just one installment of a larger tale.

Linda Medley's first Castle Waiting book is one of these problematic "graphic novels," entertaining as it is. Early chapters show the character of Lady Jain making her way to the castle and giving birth to a son--a son with intriguingly pointed ears. There are many hints of troubles from her husband and/or the father of that child. And at the end of the book we learn...about a completely different character's past. We never get answers to Lady Jain's mysteries.

Another example was the Captain America volume titled Winter Soldier. Its front flap concludes:

In this bold new series, writer Ed Brubaker enmeshes the hero in a taut thriller ripped from today's headlines of political intrigue and terrorist threats to democracy.

All quite exciting, especially for an old Invaders fan, but this "graphic novel" also leaves its hero completely enmeshed in that taut thriller. It's only half of a story at best, but do you see "Part 1" or "Volume 1" on the cover? Would a non-graphic novel ever end halfway through?

Bill Willingham's To Kill a Bird shows Tim Drake moving to a new city after the death of his father. It's entirely episodic, and about three-quarters of the way through it starts spinning out new plot threads that are never resolved. That's because this "graphic novel" is simply a collection of issues 134 to 139 of the Robin comic book, and they barely hang together. (Several whiplash changes in art styles within the book don't help.)

Dennis O'Neil's DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics even gives away the company secret of how to braid plot lines from one issue to the next, making one issue burst into flower while growing the stem for another and planting the seed for a third. Comic books, like soap operas, movie serials, and other ongoing narratives, aren't designed just to tell us a satisfying story. They're also supposed to motivate us to come back for the next issue. Unlike novels, they aren't meant to be complete.

In the past few years, DC and Marvel Comics have apparently decided to repackage nearly every issue of their most popular comic books into "graphic novels." Some of the resulting books, such as the Batman volume As the Crow Flies, are close to self-contained and thus satisfying on their own. Many more have plot threads hanging off both ends.

Age of Bronze creator Eric Shanower has commented on this blog that the term "graphic novel" now means nothing more than a physical format, a comics story thick enough for a spine. Ironically, Eric's own collected editions have satisfying story arcs, each telling a discrete leg of the saga of the Trojan War, though they're made up of individual magazine issues. (We can't expect Eric to fit all of the Trojan War saga between two covers--not even Homer managed that.)

I can't shake the worry that calling all such comics "graphic novels" does a disservice to both readers and creators by fuzzing the important differences between a collection of installments within an ongoing saga and stories conceived to stand by themselves. Both require sophisticated storytelling skills. A cliffhanger ending that makes you come back for more and a plot resolution that leaves you satisfied are both feats worthy of praise. So is it too much to hope that the industry's labels for these different types of comics become just as sophisticated, and not one-size-fits-all?

Oz and Castle Waiting

It seems entirely appropriate for the Oz books to exist in the world of Castle Waiting, the award-winning comics series by Linda Medley.

The title castle feels more than a little like the Emerald City under Ozma, with a diverse set of generally nice characters all living together in a safe and somewhat protected community. Of course, Ozma's roofs don't leak, but the two settings promise the same acceptance and stability.

In addition to that castle, a great deal of the first Castle Waiting collection takes place in a similar community: the nunnery of a bearded order. There the worst squabbles are over which sister has the best facial hair to play Jesus in the annual pageant.

In both places, the only major dangers seem to come from outside the walls, and they're easily dealt with. Characters have adventures only in the past and on the road, just as in most of the later Oz books. Indeed, the communities are so darn nice that they simply don't provide a good crop of dramatic tension. Which can, of course, be part of their charm, a reason readers like to return to those settings again and again.

(Another Oz connection: Linda Medley contributed some nice artwork to the 2003 issue of Oziana, sold by the International Wizard of Oz Club.)