Original Art by John R. Neill!

Greetings! We now have a sister blog called "The John R. Neill Collection" which is connected to our new sister website called JohnRNeill.com. I'm very excited to announce that we will be offering a fine collection or original artwork by John R. Neill for sale! CLICK HERE to see our first offerings

These wonderful drawings, paintings, and illustrations which we are offering for sale come directly from the family of John R. Neill (1877-1943). After his death, Neill's second wife, Margaret Carroll Neill (called Moy by the family), carefully preserved and treasured her husband's art work in Neill's final home, "Endolane," in Flanders, New Jersey.

Mrs. Neill died in 1984 and the Neill archive was distributed among Neill's three daughters, Natalie, Annrea, and Joan. This youngest daughter, Joan Neill Farnsworth, dutifully preserved her share for many years, making it available to researchers and scholars as needed.  Joan died in 2011 and the Neill archive was split, yet again, between Joan's four children.

The wonderful pieces offered here are all from the collection of one of the granddaughters of John R. Neill. Each piece of art sold at johnrneill.com comes with a letter of provenance. This is a rare chance to own one of Neill's original drawings. We will be featuring some of his exquisite pen-and-ink work, sumptuous paintings, original magazine art, and of course some very rare Oz material. Keep checking our store - more drawings will be added weekly.

One of the treasures of the collection is this magical rabbit painting from Pictorial Review! Click here to see the sale page.

"The Bunny Band" Original painting by John R. Neill $10,000.00 SOLD!

We also have some of Neill's exquisite pen-and-ink work such as this jaunty illustration of a dapper young couple out for a ride in their sporty automobile. Click here to see the sale page.

"Out for a ride! Pen-and-Ink by John R. Neill $1250.00

There is much more to see at our online gallery store so come on over and explore this wonderful collection! We hope, too,  that you will find much enjoyment in owning a piece of original art by one of America's most extraordinary, but under-rated illustrators from the golden age of illustration.

Come check it all out at

www.johnrneill.com

Evelyn Copelman in the Tiger Den!

There's nothing better to motivate one to get back to blogging than a new treasure to share! And this time it's a painting by an Oz artist I never had much thought of acquiring, Evelyn Copelman, the second major illustrator of The Wizard of Oz.

Watercolor by Evelyn Copelman.

Alas, the painting isn't from Wizard, but a watercolor of a country street scene. The image is a bit larger than 8" x 11", signed at the bottom right in pencil.

For those of you not acquainted, Evelyn Copelamn was the first illustrator to reillustrate a full-length edition of The Wizard of Oz after W. W. Denslow. After World War II, Wizard publisher Bobbs Merrill wanted a new edition of Wizard. The MGM film had made the book more popular than ever,  and the original Denslow illustrations were difficult to make attractive. The first edition of Wizard is stunning, but by 1903 Denslow's art was already suffering from cheap and simplified printing. By the 1920s and '30s the book was decidedly unattractive.

In 1944, Bobbs Merrill decided on a major overhaul and hired Evelyn Copelman to reillustrate the book. It was her first book illustration job. In the printed book the publisher slyly suggests the drawings are based on those of Denslow, but they are clearly much more inspired by the MGM film.

Copelman's line drawings (actually scratchboard work) in the early printings are sometimes a bit stiff and often overworked. Her paintings are much better. A few years after this new edition of Wizard was released, Copelman went back and redrew almost every image and added several new color plates, creating a much more handsome volume.

In 1947, Bobbs Merrill asked Copelman to reillustrate Baum's The Magical Monarch of Mo. She's become a much more gifted illustrator by this point, too, though her style is at odds with Baum's text. (You can read my analysis here).

However, one can see more stylistic parallels between my newly acquired painting and her Mo watercolors than one can find when examining her Wizard paintings - such as in the Mo frontispiece below.



Frontispiece of THE MAGICAL MONARCH OF MO by Evelyn Copelman.

Note how much looser her style has become in the watercolor sky above, and the similarity in technique of the forested hills at the left in the distance.

But even more similarities can be seen with my painting and the most important work of her career - illustrating the Sally, Dick, and Jane school readers!

Illustration from WE COME AND GO (1946-'47) by Evelyn Copelman as "Eleanor Campbell."

Looking at the lovely watercolored grass, the trees across the road, one can imagine Sally, Dick, and Jane walking down the country street scene in my painting. Evelyn Copelman did all of her school reader work under the pseudonym Eleanor Campbell.

Well, that's it for today in the Tiger Den. "See David Blog. Blog, David, blog!"

Dick Martin and Me

Dick Martin at 1980 Ozmapolitan Con auction.

In the late 1970s I was in a sort of teenage overdrive to build up my Oz collection. And with a desire to feel important, perhaps, I began a concerted effort to get most any book that I could autographed by its author or illustrator. Whether this compulsion to get these books autographed was simply about improving my collection, or was a chance to feel special (or was it grown up?) it allowed me to make contact with the likes of Russell MacFall, Margaret Hamilton, Edward Wagenknecht, and Philip José Farmer among others - not to mention Rachel Cosgrove and Eloise Jarvis McGraw.

I had assumed I would meet Dick Martin when I went to my first Oz convention, Winkies 1977, but I found that Dick was not in attendance. He only rarely traveled to Winkies. But in 1979 I finally got a copy of Dick’s Visitors from Oz and sent him a fan letter asking if I might send him my copy of Visitors to get it autographed. A few days later I got a postcard in the mail!

Not only was it a postcard from an actual “Royal Illustrator,” but it was an Ozzy postcard. Dick gave a very friendly go ahead to sending my copy of Visitors to him. A week or so later it arrived back to me, all nicely signed with an Ozzy inscription and a little drawing of a moon. 

Inscription by Dick Martin in THE VISITORS FROM OZ.

As an extra little present, Dick also included one of the very rare Reilly & Lee advertising Gumps for me! We exchanged letters, I told him about my collection, he told me about his Oz projects. Not only was he in the midst of illustrating the new McGraw Oz book, The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, but he was also just starting his series of cut-and assemble Oz activity books for Dover. From 1979 through the mid-1980s Dick was in a kind of Oz illustrating renaissance.

When I asked if he ever sold any of his original art, he wrote that it was all gone, as he’d given it away to friends. A few months into our correspondence I found a box of unused greeting cards at Goodwill—the cards featured his little “DM” as a signature. I sent him one and he wrote back confirming it was his work. He also included several other examples of his greeting cards, all from the mid-1950s.

We finally met at the 1980 Ozmapolitan Convention. He was cordial but very quiet and reserved. But after dinner on Friday evening before the programming began, Dick came over to me and asked me to come up to his room. I must admit I tensed a bit. Even though in 1980 I was not out (even to myself) I somehow knew that Dick was gay. Perhaps it was his rakish photo in The Oz Scrapbook? Perhaps it was because he reminded me of Tony Randall in a sort of dapper way? We went up to his room and he shut the door. He pulled an envelope from his suitcase and from it all of the original art from The Forbidden Fountain of Oz spilled onto his bed. He said: “Pick one you like—I’m letting you have first choice!”

Original drawing by Dick Martin for THE FORBIDDEN FOUNTAIN OF OZ (1980).

I chose the drawing above. Then he asked me to please not tell anyone at the convention about the gift or they’d all be bothering him. I thanked him. Before we left his room he said, “I often have a few quiet friends up to my room to talk and have a drink after the programming is over. If you’d like to join us, you would be most welcome.”

I did go to Dick’s room for a while that night and several other nights at later Ozmapolitan Conventions, too. Dick was very quiet at his parties. He was always the center of attention, drinking a good deal, telling complicated jokes, performing magic tricks; he was quite simply holding court!

I’m still unsure why he pulled me into his inner circle so quickly - perhaps he just saw some of himself in a quiet (eventually-gonna-be-gay) teenage boy Oz collector. Who knows? In any event he made me feel very special at my first Ozmapolitan Convention.

Dick Martin and Jean Brockway having breakfast at Ozmapolitan Con 1985.

Meet Dale Ulrey!

Dale Conner circa 1939

A couple weeks ago one of my readers asked why there seemed to be so little information on 1950s Oz and Baum illustrator Dale Ulrey. Indeed, no Oz folk seem to have ever even seen a photo of her! Might something be done about this? While a basic internet search proved rather fruitless, popping into a couple of Eric's and my genealogical resources turned the trick!

Mildred Dale Conner was born January 1, 1904, on a farm near Sulphur Springs, Texas. Her father was William Madison Conner (1870-1936) and her mother was Nellie Nichols (1872-1949). The family moved to Dallas in 1916 where her father became a salesman for Butler Bros., a department store and mail-order firm.

Young Mildred seems to always have drawn. The Dallas Morning News, September 2, 1939, wrote of the small brunette: "Before she was old enough to enter school, the future artist drew sketches of people. Her consuming ambition as a child was to 'write a book and draw all the pictures.'" She finished grade school at John S. Armstrong School in Highland Park, Texas, and spent all four years of High School at Oak Cliff High. She graduated in 1921.

Mildred Dale Conner at Oak Cliff High (1921).

Her year book says: "Some one has described Mildred as the little girl with the 'come hither' eyes and it's not such a bad description. Besides being very easy to look at, 'Cricket' can draw almost anything on earth - even a crowd." So little Mildred had the nickname of "Cricket." Oh, the things one can discover online! Cricket spent all four of her high school years on the staff of "The Acorn," the Oak Cliff High newspaper. 

Mildred Dale Conner and the "Art Staff" of THE ACORN.

She apparently adored her art instructor, Nellie Clement, and according again to The Dallas Morning News, two of her classmates also found art careers: Commercial artist Jewel Brannon of Fort Worth, and Lansing "Lance" Nolley, who went on to have a very full career working for Walt Disney Studios. See the "comments" section below for more information on Lance Nolley.

She spent another year in what the newspaper calls "post-graduate work" at Oak Cliff High studying art and Advanced French; and spent a year at the University of Texas "concentrating on line drawing and technical drawing." She also studied anatomy and life drawing with Vivian Anspaugh. While still studying in Dallas she began work in the art department of the Palace Theater.

Dale must have enjoyed her movie theater art work as she moved to New York (for the next twelve years) where she worked for Hap Hadley's theatrical art studio, handling publicity for many of the major movie studios.

Her earliest cartooning work seems to have begun when she started working for Martha Orr, creator of  the comic strip Apple Mary, later renamed Mary Worth's Family. In 1937, Orr married, and turned over all of the drawing chores to Dale.

One of Dale's "Apple Mary" strips from August 23, 1939 - click to enlarge

An original Sunday strip of MARY WORTH'S FAMILY from 1941.

You can read the entire and fascinating history of the transformation of Apple Mary into Mary Worth, here, in this Comics Journal essay. But Conner's reasons for departing from the strip are best summed up here, in a letter she wrote to fellow cartoonist Milton Caniff: “I’m so heart-sick over what Apple Mary has turned out to be. Working on it has become a chore. There’s no action to draw, only dull and childish conversation, and the plot is so inane that I gag as I try to make something of it. I dread seeing the proofs each week for my feeling shows in them.”

Sometime between September 1939 and April 1940 Dale Conner married Frank Herbert Melville Ulrey (1898-1958). The 1940 census shows them living in Chicago. Herb Ulrey was a navigator in World War I and after the war continued his work as a navigator, working for Sir Thomas Lipton, the famous yachtsman. A 1942 Dallas newspaper article states that Herbert Ulrey had previously drawn his own comic strip about a "G-Man," but I can find no information on or evidence for this claim.

Soon after their marriage, Dale quit Mary Worth's Family and she and Herb developed a new strip called Hugh Striver, relating the adventures of a newspaper boy; it debuted October 5, 1942.

Hugh Striver seems to have been only moderately successful. It came to an end in February 1945. You can see the first strip below:

HUGH STRIVER, October 5, 1942, by Herb & Dale Ulrey - click to enlarge

For a time the Ulreys lived in Barrington, Illinois, (on Bateman Road) and in August of 1943 they had a daughter, Dale Caroline Ulrey.

Herb and Dale Ulrey circa 1943.

In April 1945 Dale Ulrey launched a new "adventure" comic strip that she both wrote and drew called Ayer Lane, about a young man with an airplane. This strip ran until sometime in 1947.

Ulrey's AYER LANE strip from August 11, 1945 - click to enlarge

Dale Ulrey began her association with Oz publisher Reilly & Lee in 1953 when she illustrated L. Frank Baum's Jaglon and the Tiger Fairies. The cover has always struck me as extremely dull. I suspect the blame should be placed with Reilly & Lee, not Ulrey, as anyone with Ulrey's skill and gifts at composition simply could not create such an uninspired cover.

Compare the cover to one of the interior illustrations shown below. It is lovely, beautifully executed, and thoroughly charming.

Interior art for JAGLON AND THE TIGER FAIRIES by Ulrey.

In 1954 she designed a dust wrapper for Jack Snow's Who's Who in Oz, but it was used only in advertisements for the book, being replaced by the yellow and red jacket based on the endpapers of The Royal Book of Oz.

There are a number of drawings by Ulrey for Ozma of Oz. No such edition was ever published, and given the fact that they were executed in varying techniques, I suspect they were work samples. You can see more of these on Bill Campbell's Oz Enthusiast blog. One of the prettiest is seen below.

Unpublished illustration by Dale Ulrey for L. Frank Baum's OZMA OF OZ.

Reilly & Lee must have liked the samples because in 1955 Ulrey began a project to re-illustrate the Oz series with a new edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz. Presumably the publisher thought more modern illustrations would help invigorate sales.

While most Oz fans would argue that Neill's original illustrations are inseparable from Baum's text, Ulrey produced a very handsome volume. You can see and read much more about Ulrey's edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz in this previous blog post.


The next year, in 1956, Ulrey got the honor of illustrating the first edition of The Wizard of Oz to be published by Reilly & Lee.

Ulrey's jacket design for the 1956 edition of THE WIZARD OF OZ.

Ulrey's illustrations are handsome, though not as successful as those she did for Tin Woodman. They were all printed in two colors.

Dale Ulrey illustration from the 1956 edition of THE WIZARD OF OZ.

Herbert Ulrey died on January 29, 1958, of a cerebral hemorrhage. At the time he and Dale were living in Hickory, North Carolina, on 450 3rd Avenue Drive, S. E., though I can not yet find when or why the family had moved to North Carolina, but it was after 1951.

After her 1956 Wizard of Oz, Dale Ulrey may have retired, as I can find no evidence that she did any additional work in either comics or illustration. Dale died October 14, 1989, in Dallas, Texas. It seems an absolute crime that no one ever interviewed her for The Baum Bugle or tried (as far as I know) to get her to a convention. Such missed opportunities! We will take closer looks at Ulrey's edition of The Wizard of Oz in the coming weeks.

Finishing the Hat

It's always nice when something new gets to be hung on the walls of the Tiger Den - and this lovely drawing by John R. Neill is the newest arrival to the aforesaid walls.

Click to enlarge

In actuality Eric and I have owned the piece for several years but only recently got around to having it framed. It measures about 12" x 15". John R. Neill drew the illustration for a short story in the February 1926 issue of Pictorial Review called "An Actor's Love Story" by Richard Connell. Soon after we got the original drawing I tracked down a copy of the magazine in which it was printed.

In the magazine the illustration is reproduced less than 6" across - a little over a third the size of the original. It's kind of amazing how large Neill worked, given the size of reproduction. As you can see, there is another Neill illustration on this page, the one at lower left, similar in technique to the one we own. The little square vignette at the top is signed "W" and seems not to be Neill's work.

There is another lovely Neill drawing reproduced on the first page of the story (see below).

Click to enlarge.

I really like it and would love to have it as a companion piece to the one we have. Alas, I've no certain knowledge the original survives. John R. Neill sure does draw handsome young men really well, doesn't he? That's it for today!

Boys' Life

Today we go exploring with John R. Neill and a beautiful cover painting he did for the May, 1930 issue of Boys' Life.

This exotic image has always felt kind of Ozzy - as if it's an image from an unrecorded visit Captain Salt and the Crescent Moon paid to ... well ... a tropical island of some sort. The cover image seems to have no connection to any particular story in the magazine.

There seems to be so much story potential in the image! Why are the pontoon boats approaching the sailing vessel? What are they doing with the parrots? Offering them as a trade? A warning to stay away? Note there is another boat-full of boys approaching the starboard side of the ship. As far as I know the original painting no longer survives - but if it should turn up I'd certainly be pleased to have it here in the Tiger Den.

Click to Enlarge

In case you missed the announcement we will be auctioning off a piece of original John R. Neill artwork at the 2012 Winkie Convention this July. Click here for details.

White Edition Wednesday - TIK-TOK

Last week we pieced together The Patchwork Girl of Oz, so this week we've little choice but to to wind up Tik-Tok of Oz. This is actually the first hardcover "white edition" that I ever read. I already owned the ten Rand McNally "white edition" paperbacks then available, but I had never actually seen one of the hardcovers until I found a copy of Tik-Tok at the Albuquerque Public Library. I checked it out and devoured it. I remember reading Baum's letter to the readers and wondering what the heck The Tik-Tok Man of Oz was - and I was really surprised at the wraparound cover design. And that unusual feature of this "white edition" gets us firmly into today's blog.

The cover of Tik-Tok is one of Dick Martin's greatest finds and best choices. It is based on an original drawing by John R. Neill that was meant for the dust jacket of the first edition in 1914. For some reason it was not used, and Dick probably found the artwork in Reilly and Lee's files in the early 1960s. It was first published as the cover of the Christmas 1961 issue of The International Wizard of Oz Club's journal The Baum Bugle.

It would have been such a great dust jacket back in 1914! In any case, it finally joined the text it was meant for in 1964. It is too bad it throws off the uniformity of the full "white edition" series by lacking a spine vignette and having the wagon and harness wrap around the spine - but who cares, it's a grand image! Since I knew Dick Martin had access to the original line art, I was surprised to notice that he redrew the faces of Betsy, Polychrome, Ozga, and Queen Ann.

Click to Enlarge

Also note that one can only see Neill's original spine lettering on the Bugle cover - Dick redrew it to make it narrower and a tad easier to read, and, of course, to alter the publisher's name.

I thought I'd take a few minutes on this title to discuss the four-color, hand-done, color separation technique that Dick used on these books. There used to be two distinct ways to prepare an image for printing in color. One could do it photographically which required a piece of finished full-color artwork which was then photographed four times using filters to create four separate printing plates: cyan (a light blue), magenta (a vivid pink), yellow, and black (called "k"). This photographic-separation technique was always used for high-quality reproduction, for photographs, fine art books, etc., but many publishers used a cheaper method - they had a graphic artist draw each of the printing plates by hand, using his imagination to "create" a color image. This is what Dick Martin did for the "white editions." Below is an image showing each of the four drawings Dick prepared to print the Tik-Tok cover.

Click to Enlarge

The black drawing features the main line drawing - essentially Neill's original drawing. The blue drawing shows the grass, fills in some of the clothing, and outlines the title. The red drawing fills in the "Oz" and the title, the plumes on Hank's back, and is lightly shaded in to make Ozga's gown pink. The yellow drawing has lots of solid color, showing the grass again, the wagon, and a base-color for Hank. So you see, the light blue overlaps the yellow to make green grass. When you add the blue and red shading visible in Hank to the heavy yellow of Hank, you get a brownish Hank! First grade color theory at work!

Dick did something a bit unusual. He didn't always use the standard four printing colors. For example, above, he used a bright stop-sign red instead of the usual process-color magenta. The light blue was Dick's choice for all the white editions, though sometimes Reilly & Lee used cyan (which is a bit darker) and makes some printings of the books look a bit odd.

OK, on to Tik-Tok's interior. The ownership page has been omitted in favor of the "Famous Oz Books" ad - but you can see that Dick has reused the upper portion of the image.

The cover of the original edition of Tik-Tok was very striking - perhaps one reason the original dust jacket design was abandoned back in 1914. Dick must have found the cover an appealing image, too, as he traced it and prepared a new frontispiece for the book - and eliminated Tik-tok's gun. Note, too the blue outlining of the title in the original cover design. It is clearly Dick's inspiration for the same thick blue outlining on the "white edition" cover.

There are four copies of the "white edition" of Tik-Tok here in the Tiger Den, yet every copy here lists all forty Oz books on page two. Does anyone out there have a copy listing only Baum's fourteen?

Eventually, Rand McNally did release Tik-Tok in paperback, though I only found it in 1978 just as the paperback rights were being pulled from Rand McNally. It was at the same store on the same visit that I first saw the Glinda paperback, too. Rand McNally never did publish paperbacks of Rinkitink and Lost Princess. Do any of my readers recall exactly when they first saw or purchased a copy of the Rand McNally Tik-Tok or Glinda?

Next week, The Scarecrow of Oz!

Comics and More Comics

A few weekends ago Eric Shanower and I paid a visit to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco to see a wonderful  exhibit of Oz comics including lots of Eric's original artwork as well as many pieces by Skottie Young. 

There's lots of cool stuff to see - I'm also pleased to say I loaned them a page of Skottie Young art from my collection, too. One of my favorite things in the exhibition was the Denslow Father Goose comic page and also the several Neill Nip and Tuck comic pages. All the original Shanower art is great - but since it usually resides here in the Tiger Den it doesn't seem as special to me as it might to others - though I do like seeing it all matted and framed and hanging on the wall.

We’re off to see the Wizard! The Cartoon Art Museum celebrates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with an exhibition featuring vintage newspaper tearsheets and original artwork spanning over 100 years of classic comics.

At the dawn of the 20th century,  L. Frank Baum created a world of wonders that was to hold a permanent place in the culture of America: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Then in 1904, to promote his second book, Baum, along with master cartoonist Walt McDougall, brought his famed characters to Earth in a new medium, the comic strip. Famed Oz illustrators W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill also launched their own syndicated comic strips in the early 20th Century. The Cartoon Art Museum’s exhibition will include a selection of tearsheets from these talented artists: McDougall’s Queer Visitors from Marvelous Land of Oz, Denslow’s Father Goose and Billy Bounce, and Neill’s Nip and Tuck, courtesy of historian and publisher Peter Maresca of Sunday Press.

Acclaimed writer and artist Eric Shanower’s first Oz comic, The Enchanted Apples of Oz, was published in 1986, beginning his 25-year (and counting!) association with Baum’s characters.  This exhibition will feature highlights from five of Shanower’s Oz graphic novels, as well as a selection of art from his latest series of Eisner Award-winning Oz adaptations for Marvel Comics illustrated by Skottie Young.  Additional collaborators include Anna-Maria Cool and the legendary Ramona Fradon.

Presentations and booksignings featuring publisher Peter Maresca and writer/artist Eric Shanower are in the planning stages. Information on these and other Oz-related events will be available soon.

The show runs through April 15, 2012 - If you're in the area go check it out!

Soup! Soup! Soup!

I've been cleaning house and sorting boxes of Oz crap and recently ran across a drawing I did for Eric a very long time ago, back when he was editing the Oz Calendar.

In previous years I had done several drawings for the Oz Calendar and I'd not been terribly happy with any of them. I don't like drawing line art all that much, but I do like painting, and Eric suggested I try painting a calendar picture instead of working in pen-and-ink line art. So I did. The theme was to be "The Villains of Oz," as I recall. I was quite pleased with my picture - a silly drawing of the Roly-Rogues from Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix (1905). After I'd finished the drawing the "Villains" calendar theme was abandoned and the drawing was never published.

But the Roly-Rogues were getting hungry after all these years, so I've let them loose on the blog.

The Comical Land of Oz

We’re off to see the Wizard! The Cartoon Art Museum celebrates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with an exhibition featuring vintage newspaper tearsheets and original artwork spanning over 100 years of classic comics. The exhibit runs from November 12 - April 25, 2012. Click here for details.

At the dawn of the 20th century,  L. Frank Baum created a world of wonders that was to hold a permanent place in the culture of America: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Then in 1904, to promote his second book, Baum, along with master cartoonist Walt McDougall, brought his famed characters to Earth in a new medium, the comic strip.

Famed Oz illustrators W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill also launched their own syndicated comic strips in the early 20th Century.  The Cartoon Art Museum’s exhibition will include a selection of tearsheets from these talented artists: McDougall’s Queer Visitors from Marvelous Land of Oz, Denslow’s Father Goose and Billy Bounce, and Neill’s Nip and Tuck, courtesy of historian and publisher Peter Maresca of Sunday Press.

Acclaimed writer and artist Eric Shanower’s first Oz comic, The Enchanted Apples of Oz, was published in 1986, beginning his 25-year (and counting!) association with Baum’s characters.  This exhibition will feature highlights from five of Shanower’s Oz graphic novels, as well as a selection of art from his latest series of Eisner Award-winning Oz adaptations for Marvel Comics illustrated by Skottie Young.  Additional collaborators include Anna-Maria Cool and the legendary Ramona Fradon.

Presentations and booksignings featuring publisher Peter Maresca and writer/artist Eric Shanower are in the planning stages. Information on these and other Oz-related events will be available soon.

Horsing Around with John R. Neill

In celebration of the current serialization of Eric Shanower's and Skottie Young's comics adaptation of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz from Marvel Comics, I thought I might re-share this fascinating Oz piece that I first published as the back cover of Oz-story No. 3 in 1997.

Eric Shanower discovered the piece the first time he visited Joan Neill Farnsworth (Neill's youngest daughter). We made plans to borrow it and have a transparency shot the next time we were both going to visit her.

This is an unused color plate created by John R. Neill for the original 1907 edition of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. It is not known why it was rejected. The image, as you can see, shows Zeb, Dorothy, and Jim the Cab-Horse falling through the earth to the land of the Mangaboos. Neill's original painting is not know to survive; but what does survive is a proof copy still in the Neill family archives. The proof is printed on the same paper as the published color plates.

The most likely scenario is that the publisher rejected this image and asked for a new one. The original edition of Dorothy and the Wizard had sixteen color plates and I doubt it was ever meant to have had more.

In any case, Neill redrew this image as a pen-and-ink drawing for the book. The ink version is much stronger. It has a better composition, the addition of the rocks up top and the clouds below give a better sense of place, and Dorothy is a bit better drawn. All this leads me to believe the ink version was created after the color version.

I do have a pet theory for why this color plate might have been rejected.  In some books (not usually Oz books) color plates are sometimes viewed sideways, in landscape mode. If this image is looked at sideways it kind of looks like there's been a buggy accident and little Dorothy is gaping open-mouthed at their dead horse.

The falling rocks and clouds of the ink version make it clear that buggy and horse are falling. Also note that Eureka (in the birdcage) has been moved from the luggage area in back of the cab in the color version, to the more prominent spot at Dorothy's feet in the pen-and-ink version.

That's it for today's Oz history lesson! Remember to check out the hit new comics adaptation of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz at your local comic book store. And don't forget that we have copies of the first three Marvel Comics collections available at our online store. If you'd like to get them autographed by Eric Shanower just ask in the "Special Instructions" field during checkout.

An Ozma Original

Since everyone is so excited that Marvel Comics' Ozma of Oz is finally out in hardcover, I thought I'd finally share my favorite acquisition from this year's San Diego Comic Con - this page of original Ozma art by Skottie Young.

I really adore this page! I love the long shot of the Nome King's throne room, I love the expressions on Dorothy and Ozma's faces, and I love the panel showing Roquat. He seems so exactly how I always imagine the Nome King - sorta like a manipulative, spoiled, sort of charmingly rotten version of Santa Claus. And there's so much story communicated in these three panels - even with the word balloons missing!

If you don't yet have a copy of the hardcover collection of Ozma of Oz, we have copies (autographed by writer Eric Shanower) available at our on-line store. Click here to check it out!

Janis Joplin in Oz

So what did then-future rock star Janis Joplin do during her summer job at the public library in Port Arthur, Texas?  She made drawings of Oz characters!

At left is a Janis Joplin drawing of our hay-stuffed friend the Scarecrow, clearly modeled after one of John R. Neill's drawings from The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

You can read more about Joplin's life, death, and little-known talent as a painter at this website.

You can also buy very pricey limited edition giclée prints, signed and authorized by the Joplin estate, of both the Scarecrow and Jack Pumpkinhead. Joplin's brother says the Baum books were family favorites.

So to paraphrase a Joplin song, if you got dem ole Munchkin Blues again, mama - you can cheer yourself up with a Janis Joplin Oz print.

Skottie and Jack

At Comic Con I got the chance to have Skottie Young sign my copy of The Marvelous Land of Oz. I like the way he signed it.