Bill Willingham on Oz in the Fables Universe

Sequential Tart interviewed writer Bill Willingham, who’s been slowly unrolling some Oz-themed storylines in his Fables comic book:

ST: I have a couple of questions about some of the current storylines. What led to the idea of Bufkin leading a revolution in Oz? Frank L. Baum had some strong political opinions; did that play into at all?

BW: To a certain extent. My reading of the Oz books was woefully antiquated in that I did it early on in life and hadn't revisited them as often as I should. And this is what I found out about Oz readers: Oz readers are fanatical readers. They want things correct. The few dips I've made into the Oz world had readers and some of the people who work in the Fables camp, like Eric Shanower, who has done the odd Fables book, and who, of course, is a massive Oz fan [Shanower writes Oz-themed comics for IDW and Marvel Comics], and Todd Klein, our letterer from day one: massive Oz fan — which apparently is a redundancy. There's no such thing as just a middle-of-the-road Oz fan. They called me out on the tiniest little thing. It is not the Lunchpail Tree; it is the Lunchbox Tree.

I realized that if I wanted to play in Oz at all, which I wanted Bufkin to eventually do again someday, I'd have to either have all my ducks in a row and massively re-immerse myself in the Oz stuff — or create a situation wherein I'm the only expert, [and can say], "Todd, Eric, what you don't understand is that when the Adversary conquered Oz, he made all these changes and all these changes are inscribed only in my mind, so nyah nyah, here's the way it is now, and you're just going to have to live with it."

I decided to go that route, so Bufkin finding that the whole place was conquered and overrun by the gnome king, who, when the big empire fell, continued on with his little local empire. Well, it was obvious that Bufkin, having defeated the djinn and slain Baba Yaga would think, "Overthrow a dinky little side-empire like this? Easy." It almost wrote itself, and it solved the problem of these guys who could so easily point out where I got things wrong.

I suspect Sequential Tart asked about Baum’s “strong political opinions” because he was progressive for his time while Willingham identifies himself as a conservative. But Willingham didn’t address that potential conflict.

I’ve written before about how the Ozma and Dorothy of Willingham’s Fables universe bear little resemblance to Baum’s characters. In contrast, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse, and the Glass Cat act quite familiar. As for Bufkin, he’s a true original.

(Hat tip to Blair Frodelius’s Daily Ozmapolitan.)

Dorothy the Assassin?

Last month I noted how the Fables spin-off comic book Cinderella: Fables Are Forever is using the character of Dorothy Gale as the heroine’s nemesis. Or actually a grown-up Dorothy Gale who looks a lot more like Judy Garland than like John R. Neill’s blonde.

I found an interview at the Outhousers with Chris Roberson, scripter of that series, explaining how he found this take on Dorothy:

Last year my wife and I were watching The Wiz one night on DVD, and I noticed something about Dorothy Gale I'd never thought about before: namely, that she is a killer for hire.

When Dorothy goes to kill the Wicked Witch for the Wizard in exchange for a trip back home, she is agreeing to commit murder in exchange for pay, essentially. She killed the Wicked Witch of the East by accident at the beginning of the story when Dorothy's house landed on her, but when she takes out the Wicked Witch of the West it is a premeditated, conscious act. So by the end of that first Oz story, Dorothy has killed two witches and profited from it.

I figured that maybe she learned that she had a taste for it, and after the end of her story went on to become a PROFESSIONAL killer for hire. . . .

Roberson’s take on the basic Wizard of Oz plot reminded me of a summary of the MGM movie I’d once read, which the internet tells me was composed by Rick Polito of the Marin Independent Journal:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.

As I wrote earlier, I authored a Baum Bugle article called “Dorothy the Conqueror.” It points out that the little girl and her company subdue, depose, or put into vassalage the following rulers: the Wicked Witch of the East, the Queen of the Field Mice, the Wicked Witch of the West, the King of the Flying Monkeys, the Wizard, the China Princess, the giant spider, the Chief Wheeler, Princess Langwidere, the Nome King, the Mangaboo Princess, and the King of the Gargoyles. And that’s just her first three adventures. So I agree that Dorothy certainly develops a taste for putting things right. I wouldn’t go so far as saying she’s a contract killer, but it’s a better fit for her than for some other heroines.

In this publicity interview Roberson also said:

there is a lot more creepy stuff in the [Oz] books than we ever saw on screen. The Technicolor Oz is a pretty domesticated place, and one that audiences are very comfortable with, but the Oz of the books has all of these odd little creatures and concepts scattered around the landscape, that make good fodder for stories like this.

We could therefore see a lot more of Dorothy and Oz in Cinderella just as Bill Willingham’s version of Ozma goes superhero in Fables.

Bufkin the Bibulous, Bufkin the Brave

From the very first issues of Fables, scripted by Bill Willingham and drawn mainly by Mark Buckingham with Steve Leialoha, L. Frank Baum’s Oz universe has been represented by the character of Bufkin, a winged monkey working in the Fabletown mayor’s office.

As a bibulous office grunt, not to mention a monkey with wings, Bufkin was natural comic relief. Every so often he might show some hidden ambition.
But like so many filing monkeys, it seemed clear that Bufkin wouldn’t actually do anything. (That page of art is by Jim Rugg. Note how it gets away with stacking panels on the left through clever use of text and balloon tails.)

In the issues collected in Witches, Bufkin takes center stage for one plotline. Trapped in the office with the evil witch Baba Yaga and a bunch of disembodied heads, he has to figure out how to survive.

Critics of Fables have pointed out how so many of the series’s stories involve its young male characters turning out to be fearsome warriors and genius tacticians. The first example was Bigby, the Big Bad Wolf—of course, we’d expect him to be sly and bloodthirsty. In fact, Bigby’s character journey over the first volumes was to become a stable husband and father.

But in subsequent issues, we see the deadly skills of Little Boy Blue, carrying the vorpal blade. Then Prince Charming, who’s simply a handsome cad in the first issues. Aladdin, ambassador from the Arabian fairy tales. And even the Frog Prince, a gawky janitor turned warrior-king.

In fact, this repeated plot might be inescapable. Heroic characters are supposed to grow. Adventure comics involve plot twists, surprises, and big ups and downs. The good guys usually win. Fables is essentially a war comic. The comics form puts a premium on working out conflict through dramatic physical action. Put that all together, and you keep coming back to heads being sliced off.

Still, to see Bufkin embark on the hero’s journey in the Witches volume is a surprise. To Willingham’s credit, he writes it as a surprise for Bufkin as well. Our little monkey also ends up with a bit of a swelled head.

Bufkin’s story continues in Fables, #101, which has the additional delight of Eric Shanower as guest penciler. It looks like Vertigo hired him to give Buckingham a bit of a breather after a big anniversary issue. Whatever the backstage story, it’s delightful to see Shanower’s traditional characterizations of Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse, and the Glass Cat, and a new version of lunch-bucket trees.

Fables and Ozian Decadence

Yesterday I quoted comics scripter Bill Willingham’s 2009 essay against “Superhero Decadence,” which appears to be a politicized way of expressing the common thought that superhero comics aren’t as good as they were when a person was twelve.

Willingham’s major work in comics now is Fables, which takes fairy-tale heroes and moves them to our world, where they live in secret among us. (Other authors exploring this idea include Michael Buckley in The Sisters Grimm and Sarah Beth Durst in Into the Wild and Out of the Wild.)

All public-domain fantasy characters are available to Willingham. The unusual copyright situation of Peter Pan caused him some troubles, but L. Frank Baum’s Oz characters are fair game. Glinda and her swan-drawn chariot appeared in one frantic panel of an early issue of Fables, and Dorothy Gale and her companions have shown up several times in the companion series, Jack of Fables.

The most prominent refugees from Oz in the Fables comic books are Bufkin the winged monkey, whom I’ll discuss tomorrow, and a young witch identified as Ozma in issue #87. She’s not precisely like Baum’s Ozma: there’s no mention of fairy ancestry, early life as a boy, or the throne of the Emerald City. But with a poppy in her hair, she’s clearly meant to evoke the little queen of Oz.

Except that Baum’s Ozma was entirely benevolent, sometimes naively so—as in The Emerald City of Oz, when she’s willing to let evil creatures overrun her kingdom because she can’t think of any way to stop them without hurting them, and Ozma of Oz and Glinda of Oz, in which she heads off to help other kingdoms without thinking of how to protect herself.

In contrast, Willingham’s Ozma is a little schemer, fairly ruthless at the internal politics of Fabletown and promising to be more ruthless about its latest adversaries. She’s also very good at magic, while Baum’s Ozma gains her magical knowledge gradually, and never seems as capable as Glinda the Good Sorceress.

Indeed, the character in Fables is a much better match for Baum’s Glinda, who is far more authoritarian, secretive, and militaristic than Ozma in her approach to protecting Oz. But Glinda doesn’t offer the striking visual paradox of a little girl acting like a tough commander.

Meanwhile, Cinderella, a Fables spin-off scripted by James Roberson, has featured another version of Dorothy Gale, as Jer Alford reports at Emerald Hearts in Oz. That magazine features Cinderella as a deadly secret agent, and Dorothy shows up as a rival assassin from Russia. She’s fully grown, and—based on this panel, which is all that I’ve seen—goes around pointing guns in her underwear.

Willingham and his colleagues have every right to use Baum’s characters as they choose, and Fables continues to be an entertaining adventure comic. I don’t insist that depictions of Oz remain pure and childish, having frequently pointed out Glinda’s realpolitik and even published an article titled “Dorothy the Conqueror,” about the character’s tendency to wipe out her enemies.

But Ozma’s different. Open, unadulterated, and sometimes heedless kindness is what defines Ozma in Baum’s books. Willingham’s rant about superheroes becoming “decadent”—straying from their traditional characterizations to become violent, selfish, and cynical—seems to apply even more to his series’ treatment of Ozma.

Yet More Oz Comics to Collect

The latest installment of Bill Willingham’s comic serial Fables, issue #101, offers yet another approach to creating Oz comics from Eric Shanower.

Shanower started out writing and illustrating his own comics stories, published in Adventures in Oz. He adapted Walt Spouse’s 1930s newspaper strip into a more modern format, published by Hungry Tiger Press. He’s now scripting Marvel’s ongoing series of L. Frank Baum adaptations for Skottie Young to draw, an effort that’s already won the team two Eisner Awards.

In this magazine Shanower’s creating art from someone else’s Oz-related script. Bufkin, the bibulous Winged Monkey who works for the Fabletown government, gets some spotlight time. Other Oz characters have appeared in Fables, and Shanower has illustrated a previous page, but I think this is the first time those beams have crossed.

In addition, I see that Willingham’s version of Ozma plays a prominent role in the next five-issue arc.

The Eisner Award Nominations of Oz

Among this year’s nominees for Eisner Awards for excellence in American comics are three with an Oz connection.

Eric Shanower and Skottie Young’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz was nominated for Best Limited Series or Story Arc, and for Best Publication for Kids. Shanower has won two Eisners for his Age of Bronze series, but for Young, judging by his reaction on Twitter, this is an exciting new honor.

Philippe Ghielmetti’s design for the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz collection from Sunday Press was nominated for Best Publication Design [and, the Wonderful Blog of Oz points out, for Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips]. This is a giant-size reissue of the newspaper comic page Baum wrote in the early 1900s, along with a competing series from his former colleague W. W. Denslow.

And, though it’s several steps off the Yellow Brick Road, the magazine Fables received nominations for Best Continuing Series and Best Writer in Bill Willingham. A young magic-worker named Ozma has been appearing in this comic book’s recent storylines.

David Small’s Stitches received nominations for Best Reality-Based Work and Best Writer/Artist–Nonfiction. It’s notable that this book was not nominated as Best Publication for Kids or Best Publication for Teens. Within the comics community, there’s no assumption that the comics form automatically makes a work suitable for younger readers.

Let’s Examine That

I enjoyed the great march of Bill Willingham and (mostly) Mark Buckingham’s Fables comic to issue #75. In fact, I’ve been planning a “Willingham week” for a while; that prospect was both strengthened and postponed when I received a review copy of his new novel, Peter and Max.

Nonetheless, I haven’t read either of the Fables volumes that followed War and Pieces, the one that brought the heroes’ war against their Adversary to an end. I fear that further Fabletown stories would be an anticlimax, and am instead thinking about picking up the first issues in the deluxe edition.

But now I understand that a young magic-worker named Ozma is a major character in the current story arc. Here she is illustrated by Buckingham in issue #90, with the telltale poppy in her hair.

But didn’t John R. Neill drew Ozma with dark hair in most of the Oz books? Yes, but in the character’s first appearance in The Marvelous Land of Oz L. Frank Baum described Ozma’s hair as “tresses of ruddy gold,” and Neill’s one portrait of her is consistent with that. Only when Neill had started drawing Dorothy Gale as a blonde did he make Ozma and brunette. When Dorothy is brunette, as in the Return to Oz movie and in Fables, Ozma becomes blonde.

This isn’t the first time Willingham has borrowed characters from the Oz books for Fables. Early on we had glimpses of Dorothy and her companions, and of Glinda in her swan chariot. A bibulous winged monkey named Buffum is an ongoing presence, but his personality is Willingham’s own invention. Ozma seems to be the most prominent ongoing character from the Oz books to also become a prominent ongoing character in Fables.

However, there’s a lot more to Ozma than simply having a flower in her hair and being able to work magic (a talent she developed only late in Baum’s series). And the few preview pages I’ve seen don’t convince me that this girl is the real Ozma.

It May Sound Harsh

The first Jack of Fables collection, The (Nearly) Great Escape (script by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges; art by Tony Akins and Andrew Pepoy) offers a--well, let's say rare picture of the most beloved Oz characters.

At some point I'll praise Willingham's Fables comics in more detail, but for now I'll just report that this volume is based on the premise that a bunch of characters from fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and fantasy literature are being held captive in a prison camp surrounded by tigers. (Don't you hate when that happens?)

The title character, Jack--as in Horner, Beanstalk, being nimble, etc.--masterminds a mass escape. And among the characters who make a dash for the fence are Dorothy, her three famous companions from Oz, and her little dog, too.

Dorothy is pictured as a teenager in cowboy boots, jeans, tight stomach-baring top, and hairband. Such a depiction is only to be expected in the Fables comics, since they're published by the adult division of DC and they show other human fairy-tale characters dressed (or undressed) like pretty young things of today. Plus, we've seen similar Dorothys in many other recent comics.

As this Dorothy and her friends climb the fence, a tiger roars up. Toto starts to snap and bark at it, just as he barks at the Cowardly Lion when they first meet.

And the tiger eats Toto. We see this in some detail. It's like a National Geographic special for a couple of panels.

Then Dorothy tells her other friends, "It may sound harsh, but I'm kind of relieved. That's the first time that flea-bitten mongrel's quit yapping in a hundred years!"

A couple of pages later, other characters explain, "killed Fables often get magically replaced by new versions of the same Fable." That should reassure us about Toto's ultimate fate, but the same panels offer another look at his half-eaten hindquarters.

Did I mention that the Fables comics are written for adults?