Sunday Splash Page #169

 

"Casting James Franco in a Movie About the Wizard Oughta Do It", in Dorothy of Oz vol. 1, chapter 4, by Son Hee-Joon.

I bought this, I think 7 or 8 years ago, for reasons that are no longer clear. I'm not sure I've ever read Baum's Oz work, or been a big fan of the Judy Garland movie or anything like that. Didn't read those comic adaptations Skottie Young did for Marvel in the 2000s. But here we are.

But Tolkein or Arthurian-style medieval fantasy, with the knights and bearded wizards and whatnot usually doesn't interest me either, but most of the JRPGs I've played are in that sort of setting. So maybe I was just curious to see Oz stuff through a Korean aesthetic.

In this version, Dorothy is some fabled person who could see the Yellow Brick Road, but the lead is a schoolgirl name Mara who somehow wandered from our world into Oz while chasing her dog. Because she seems to come from somewhere else, and can also see the road, people call her Dorothy, to her annoyance. When the story begins, she already has her crew with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion. 

Except they're actually subjects of military experiments. Well that's certainly a different take. The Scarecrow is a telekinetic who confuses words. The Woodsman a cyborg with no emotions. The Lion a moderately androgynous lion chimera. Or maybe I just figured Son Hee-Jon would make the Lion a catgirl given his complaints about how he didn't include any hot girls in this to draw in the bonus outtake comics at the back. And how Mara undergoes a "magical girl transformation" complete with disintegrating and rematerializing clothes.

I only ever bought the first volume. I didn't love the series, but I think the reason I never bought any further volumes was either it seemed unlikely the series would be released in full in the U.S., or it wasn't going to be finished period. I forget which exactly, but it boiled down to the same thing: Not letting myself get sucked into something that was going to remain unresolved. I've had enough American comics where the creative team gets abruptly changed and storylines are dropped, or they just lose interest and things. . .just. . .stop.