The Wizard of Oz as a manga

Venue: Oz the Manga by David Hutchison is available as dead treeware from the publisher, Antarctic Press of San Antonio, Texas. There are nine individual comic books priced at $3 apiece. Since Oz the Manga was published in 2005, I would call or email Antarctic Press to see if they had any paper copies left. Oz the Manga is also available as a free download from Wowio.com. Wowio's website rules don't allow you to download more than three ebooks a day, so it would take you 3 days to download all nine issues.

Art: It's the Wizard of Oz done in Japanese manga style. If you don't know what the term "manga" means, manga is the Japanese word for graphic novels. Here in North America, we call them comic books whether the content is funny or not. That's because of the rather absurd attitude in this part of the world that "comic books" are really just frivolous illustrated stories for children, hence the name reflects the attitude. Manga style is immediately identifiable with its exaggerated big eyes and round faces for kids, use of specific pictorial symbols to convey visual clues in the plot (stylized nose drip while sleeping, bead of sweat for anxiety/nervousness, etc.) and more realistic body types with a tendency toward proportionally bigger heads (as opposed to American comic book style
with proportionally smaller heads on anatomically-exaggerated bodies).

So anyway, Oz the Manga is drawn manga style, and it's very good manga style too, done in black at white like most manga. I just love the picture of Dorothy and her friends on the very last page of issue 6. This is a mature version of Dorothy who has been through a lot, who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to ask for what she's due. There's some lovely drawing in Oz the Manga, but that last frame in issue 6 is the one that really sticks with me.

Age Groups: You can safely give this manga to kids of any age. I suspect older kids might be bored, especially since TV has usurped the place of the book in kids' lives these days.

Publishing Frequency: the series was originally a monthly comic book. The entire series was finished in 2005 so now you can get all nine issues all at the same time.

Story: Oz the Manga is a faithful retelling of Baum's original 1900 book with a handful of episodes left out of the main story line for the sake of continuity. Most of those skipped episodes like the country of china doll people become flashbacks in the ninth issue, which is labeled as the epilogue issue. There are isolated spots in the series where the action jumps into the next scene without a good scene transition, like the jump from the post-Wicked Witch of the West audience of Dorothy's group with the Wizard and the meetings afterward that the Wizard has individually with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. The poor transitions are jarring but they are thankfully few.

The portrayal of Dorothy is not the semi-hapless, fortunate-through-accident, girly-girl Judy Garland version of the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. This is the Dorothy of Baum's books: honest, forthright, kind and brave - the apotheosis of the self-reliant Midwest farm girl. This Dorothy is more like Harold Gray's original Little Orphan Annie than anything else. Dorothy doesn't sing and there aren't any rainbows. This is the real Dorothy Gale, not the Hollywood version.

Setting: Can you say "good ol'fashioned family values"? I knew you could. Dorothy Gale is a great kid and a great role model. Glinda the Good's short appearance at the end of the story is an example of noblesse oblige, especially toward the flying monkeys. The Wizard of Oz himself may be a "humbug" but he is forgivably so due to his very frank admission of his faults to Dorothy and her friends. Giving up his life as ruler of Oz in order to try to take Dorothy home is generous in the extreme, especially given what he has to give up in order to keep his promise to her.

To be totally truthful, Baum wrote very strong female characters all the way around and was known as an advocate of womens' suffrage, which was one of the largest womens' issues of his day. Critics and scholars of his books often see his views about suffrage reflected in the Oz books and other books by Baum.

Baum's Oz books have been occasionally banned or censored, sometimes on the grounds that Baum has "good witch" characters who use magic. Some of his Oz books have also been labeled as racist because he used late 19th C. stereotypes of black people in them. While Hutchison's faithful adaptation of Oz as a manga can certainly be painted with the former brush regarding the biblical knee-jerk reaction of some fundamentalists over witches in fiction, the former is not a factor at all in Baum's first book and its manga adaptation under discussion here.

Other Comments: Get these for your kids if they are still available on dead treeware or download them and share. This graphic novel adaptation of The Wizard of Oz is first-rate and a good example of just how good "comic books" can be.

Antarctic Press is a little comics company based in San Antonio. A bunch of small comics ventures started up in the 1980s. Most folded, Antarctic didn't so they've got to be doing something right. I've not been partial to a lot of their stuff over the years since much of it feels like it's targeted at the American male adolescent market and all that entails (stupid costumes, 2D characters and plots, etc.). Oz the Manga shows that Antarctic is breaking out of their old mold and maturing as a comics company, which is nice to see. To be truthful, I wouldn't mind at all if the author, Hutchison, did some more manga adaptations of L. Frank Baum's books. I would certainly pick them up if he did.

The Dreamland Chronicles - a near perfect comic

As far as I'm concerned, The Dreamland Chronicles is as good as it gets. This is on the list for what I'll be getting the niece and nephew for Christmas. So, let's break things down and critique this graphic story.

Venues: Online comic, trade paperback collections and Wowio. If you want to get a good idea of what Dreamland Chronicles is like, download some issues of it from Wowio. (What? You've never heard of Wowio??? Oh my, are you in for a pleasant surprise! Wowio is a website with free ebook downloads. You do need to register but their privacy pledge is solid.)

Art: awesome CGI work. Having played with some computer rendering myself, turning out a page per day of this stuff is astounding. Way good art, some of the best on the internet. I've attached a sample page to this post so you can see for yourself.

Age Groups: kids of any age (and as my grandmother was fond of saying, you're only young twice...). Even the high school-aged cynics should like this one.

Publishing Frequency: usually everyday. I have no idea how the author and his crew manage to do this.

Story: The plot is a very well-done adventure-quest theme involving a guy named Alexander and his mythical friends, an elf princess, a fairy and a rock giant. Superficially, it looks like it could be a D&D adventure but do not be fooled. It's not D&D - it's closer to Oz or Tolkien or Treasure Island than it is to fantasy RPG. As a little boy, Alexander used to visit his friends in Dreamland every night until he was 12. After an encounter with a nasty dragon over a sword he found, Alexander stops dreaming altogether until he's in college. He finds a pendant one day and suddenly is back to visiting Dreamland again, where his old friends have also grown up and they are having troubles. The elf princess's parents are missing...so the old friends begin a quest to find them. And that's just the starting premise...

Setting: An unnamed college campus somewhere in North America and Dreamland, the land of dreams populated by elves, fairies, dragons, pirates, etc. Mythical creatures and magic are real in Dreamland but there's no disturbing moral ambivalence here - the Dreamland setting has very sharp standards of right and wrong. Fighting nasty giants, kidnapping pirates and evil dragons is good; lying, arrogance, dishonesty, etc. are bad. If he were alive today, the plot could easily be something that Robert Louise Stevenson wrote but in a fantasy setting. Needless to say, there is no bad language and no unwelcome sexual content. You can read this stuff to your kindergarten-aged kids at bedtime. You'll want to read it yourself too.

Other comments: The Dreamland Chronicles are addictive. The comic is available for free reading at http://www.thedreamlandchronicles.com. There is now an RSS feed which is really convenient. You can download short episodes for free at Wowio, http://www.wowio.com/users/comicshome.asp?cbPublisher=37. The Wowio downloads actually help support the comic in terms of putting food on the table for the artist and his crew so I'd encourage everyone to do this. Efforts this good deserve support. I've seen too many promising online comics die because it's really hard to make a living this way. Besides, Wowio downloads are free! What do you have to lose? The comic is also being released in trade paperback collections. As of this date, there are two volumes of the collected series - and this is the form that the niece and nephew will be getting for Christmas. There are links to buy the trade paperback collections on the comic's website and I would urge you to use them instead of buying from Amazon.com directly. When you use those links, a small amount of revenue from the sale goes back to the author, and you already know why I think that's a good thing.

One thing that I really like about The Dreamland Chronicles are the female characters. The medical researcher studying sleep disorders is smart, sassy and appropriately professional - she reminds me of my late grandmother the doctor. The fairy character is a girly-looking girl but she knows how to take care of herself and her friends. She's solid and brave, someone you can count on in a pinch. The elf princess can be a real stuffed shirt and displays really pompous behavior at times. She can get a bit wound up - but her friends manage to deflate the worst of her behaviors. Despite that, she is brave, loyal, strong, determined, organized, smart, and very moral. She's been raised to be a ruler who will do the right thing for her kingdom. She's a knockout too, but in sensible shoes... The girls in this comic are very good role models. As someone who got really sick and tired of wimpy female superheroes in DC and Marvel comics as a kid, I'm happy to say that The Dreamland Chronicles do their female characters right.

While this is a comic that young kids are going to enjoy, don't make the mistake of thinking that comics are just for kiddies. The rest of the world knows that comics are for everybody - it's about time that Americans figured that out too. You think all those Latin puns in Asterix or Captain Haddock's pursuit by a famous opera singer in Tintin are for little kids?!? Guess again! Seriously, The Dreamland Chronicles have huge appeal to people of all ages. The story is good and the characters are extremely well developed and they grow and change with time. I really do think that comparing it to the sophistication of Oz is justified. Checking it out online or downloading it from Wowio doesn't cost you anything except for a few minutes of your time. What do you have to lose?

Let me just say here and now that I have no connection of commercial interest in anything that I review here. This is a review, not an advertisement. I'm doing this blog because I love comics - and no other reason than that.

The Harry Potter Effect, Oz, Narnia and Totoro

I realized the other day how defensive I was feeling when I wrote the first post to this blog. I feel I spent more time than I ought to have addressing the issue of the "young earth"/"creationist" view point vs. the more "inclusive" world view of the Japanese manga What's Michael and Bleach. I think this happened because of my intent to review "comic books" from the perspective of adults trying to evaluate what sort of comics their kids are reading. I've been through this already with respect to buying comics and anime that the "rent-a-kid" used to watch and find myself doing these evaluations again for buying stuff for my niece and nephew, both in grade school.

The problem here is what part of what I've been calling "The Harry Potter Effect." Basically, there are fundamentalist Christians who have gone nutso because of the world view extent in the Harry Potter books, especially concerning the terms of "witch" and "wizard." It's that whole "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" bit in the bible (Exodus 22:18). If you subscribe to the most extreme version of this world view (see Deut 18:9-14), then all witches are bad and using magic is bad too. It is clear that the bible disapproves of magic and witches (and there is much more than just Exodus 22:18 - the disapproval is found multiple places in the Old Testament) then using this line of reasoning, it should also be clear that the Harry Potter books are bad because they present some witches, wizards and magic as being good.

To be honest, I personally think that this fundamentalist Christian take on Harry Potter is a bit absurd. Seriously, anyone with sense knows that fiction is not real life. To think that your kids will be corrupted if they read Harry Potter is ridiculous. Give your kids some credit for having brains enough to distinguish between the real world and make-believe. To think that all good Christian kids will go to hell because they read Harry Potter treats your kids as stupid and robs them of an opportunity to exercise critical thinking. The key here is what is known as "the suspension of disbelief." Good fiction requires the suspension of disbelief because all fiction is make-believe.

I think that the Harry Potter Effect became an issue because of the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies. There are certainly other works of fiction and film that have sympathetic treatments of witches and magic; the Wizard of Oz is a very good example of this. These treatments usually distinguish between good (white) magic and bad (black) magic and between good witches like Glinda the Good and bad witches like the Wicked Witch of the West. It's all made up and everyone above the age of eight knows this. To let the single issue of magic use determine whether your kids read a story ignores the positive morality inherent in these stories. The Land of Oz and Harry Potter present clear depictions of right and wrong in self consistent make-believe settings. The authors of these works have never pretended that their stories were anything other than fiction. If we insist that the biblical prohibition against magic be applied to all fiction, then Narnia is just as bad as Harry Potter because many of the Narnia protagonists use magic to do good. Get a clue, folks: it's all make-believe. If you are a member of the ban-Harry-Potter club, my advice is to get over it. Instead, I think you would do your kids some good if you used works like Harry Potter to contrast and compare fictional settings with scripture.

Given that the Harry Potter Effect is an issue for some folks, this makes reviewing comic books and manga problematic. Manga plots in particular use settings that are often very different from the ethical monotheism of Western civilization. That difference is sometimes very subtle and many non-Japanese will miss it. What's Michael has a very good example of this. In What's Michael, Michael the cat is shown washing his ears in front of small Japanese sculptures as the narrator tells the reader that this motion denotes sadness in cats. Every native of Japan knows that these sculptures are not only ubiquitous in Buddhist temples, they are grave markers and memorials for the deceased. Most non-Japanese will not realize that Michael is washing his ears (expressing sorrow) in front of a grave marker in the middle of a cemetery. Another example of this phenomenon is found in the feature-legnth animation My Friend Totoro (Tonari no Totoro). The toddler Mei becomes lost and the second half of the movie is spent looking for her. At one point, she sits down in front of some stone buddha statues. When this happens, Japanese viewers will know immediately that all will turn out well for Mei - because those statues are gizo statues. Gizo are like Buddhist guardian angels for lost children. People make devotions to gizo to help them find lost children in a way that closely parallels the Roman Catholic intersession of the saints.

The modern Japanese world view in My Friend Totoro is strongly influenced by Japanese Buddhism and Shinto. Mei is protected by gizo. The old Japanese farmer woman prays with her Buddhist prayer beads. The father and his two daughters pay their prayerful respects to the spirit of the giant camphor tree. Let's face it: there is nothing even remotely Judeao-Christian in this animated movie. Should we protest against this movie because of that? If we subscribe to the attitude embodied by Harry Potter Effect and apply it rigorously, then anime movies like My Friend Totoro should also be placed on the list of things that should be banned for the sake of our American children. My Friend Totoro is a G movie and a wonderful portrayal of family values. It's such a good piece of entertainment that when I showed the movie to the high school-aged rent-a-kid, he liked it despite the lack of chase scenes, transformer-fu, and superhero action.

Frankly, if we are going to judge popular Japanese anime and manga to see if they conform to a wished-for Christianized American culture, then we might as well stop importing them; and while we're doing that, we should shove our heads back into the sand, fence all our borders, give up our status as a superpower and sink into isolationism. We'll have to start censoring content on the internet too since you can find a huge amount of readily available manga and anime online.

I am not going to stop reviewing the settings of graphic novels because I find the Harry Potter Effect deplorable. A lot of folks care about things like smoking, profanity, sexual content and violence when it relates to their own children. I know I care about those things too when it comes time to find more graphic novels to give the niece and nephew for Christmas. I've been down this road before, especially when it involved what the rent-a-kid read and watched when he was in grade school (no RoboTech without finishing his homework first!). I am not, however, going to obsess over these issues like I did on my first two posts. I think people just have to be aware that manga and anime will almost always reflect aspects of the modern Japanese culture where they are produced.

What's Michael? - The Cat Lover's Comic

What's Michael by Makoto Kobayashi is admittedly one of my favorite manga. I suppose if you don't care for cats, then you probably wouldn't care for this comic. What's Michael follows the adventures of a ginger tabby called (surprise!) Michael. The story telling is not strictly sequential over the 11 volumes that have been published in English. Little kids may be confused by this since the stories often change setting: in one, Michael may be owned by a young Japanese couple; in the next, Michael may be owned by an older couple with children and in a third, Michael might be owned by a yakuza (Japanese mafia member). There are even story settings that place groups of cats in business suits or playing baseball in sport team uniforms. There is no consistent setting and Michael doesn't have one consistent home or set of owners. The stories are all episodes involving the cat Michael, his mate Popo, the monsterous Catzilla, any number of other cats, different dogs including one common repeat character named Bear, a couple of yakuza with pet anxieties, and all sorts of other everyday folk living in suburban Japan. Though the stories, settings, language and presentation are all appropriate for even little kids in the lower grades at elementary school, the ever-changing settings can be confusing for the younger age groups.

If you're looking to buy What's Michael for kids, be prepared to explain why the settings change. Also be prepared to explain why people in the comic do things like sit on the floor at a low table to eat meals or sleep on futons on the floor. All of the settings are modern suburban Japanese. The people in the comic are not North Americans - something that's most noticeable by the amount that they smoke. If you buy this comic for your kids, be prepared for this and be prepared to talk with your kids about it.

Like most manga, published weekly in Japan in serial form, the art is black-and-white. It is also very crisp and unlike a lot of manga, the faces of many of the characters are often distinctly Japanese. The ever-changing settings are part of the charm of the What's Michael and the take-off of The Planet of the Apes, appropriately titled The Planet of the Cats (Dark Horse volume #11) is a side-splitter. The author of this comic really understands his cats.

What's Michael is appropriate for all ages - though I suspect a lot of modern American adolescent boys would be bored by it. For the rest of us, it's a great read and a lot of fun. There is no bad language, no inappropriate or graphic violence, no "adult situations." Once in a great while, there may be a glimpse of modest mundane underwear under pajamas - your average American beach is worse...

What's Michael is published in English by Dark Horse Comics. It's initial debut in the USA won a New York Library Book Award in 1990. For about 6 years, it was also serialized in Dark Horse's now defunct Super Manga Blast which was not at all appropriate for little kids due to the rest of its content. As of this writing, Dark Horse has put out 11 volumes of What's Michael as 100-page self-contained collections of 4 to 8 stories. One of my biggest beefs over Dark Horse's publication of What's Michael is that the oldest volumes are out of print and hard to find. Every one of these volumes is worth owning in my opinion. Personally, I'd like to find all 11 volumes of What's Michael to give to my niece and nephew for Christmas.