“Oz Comics Today” Two Days Ago

Last weekend I traveled to the Monterey Peninsula for the 2011 Winkie Convention, a gathering of Wizard of Oz fans from the western US and elsewhere. One attendee came from Australia, so my cross-country journey wasn’t the longest.

At the convention I moderated a panel discussion on “Oz Comics Today,” shown above. The panelists were three writers of comic books being published now:

• Eric Shanower, who’s adapting L. Frank Baum’s novels with artist Skottie Young, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz through (as planned) The Road to Oz at least. Eric’s Little Adventures in Oz are also available now.
• Kirk Kushin, author and publisher of Ozopolis; the second issue, illustrated by Gonzalo Martinez, made its debut at the conference.
• Tommy Kovac, scripter of The Royal Historian of Oz, a five-issue series from SLG, illustrated by Andy Hirsch; it’s scheduled to be republished in paperback this year.

Since I think comics discussions work best with both words and pictures, I used the screen behind us to show pages from the panelists’ work. Each writer then explained how he had conceived those pages and how they had developed.

We then discussed many parts of the intersection of Oz and comics, from the first Oz comics people remember and what sort of clothes Button-Bright should wear to whether a grown-up Dorothy Gale should wear any clothes at all (i.e., Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls). Great panelists, good audience, lots of fun.