The Marvelous Wizard of Oz: The First collaborative effort between Marvel and DC comics

[ozaline]

Well it's the 80th anniversary of the MGM adaptation of the Wizard of Oz this month (the 15th would be the anniversary of the Hollywood Premiere and the 25th of the general release).

So let's look at the historic comic adaptation. I assume most of you know the film, so I am gonna post random pages that I like; 18/72 story pages.
























Fun fact that sequence is lifted from the Broadway play, also it will create a continuity problem for the next issue.











I freaking hate that moral, that's a horrible lesson, and not one in Baum's book.







I like this book, I think it's pretty interesting how they handle the musical numbers too.

Comments

[kamino_neko]

I like the art, here. It's better than I usually expect from comic art trying to look like real people without being caricatures. Do you know who 'The Tribe' are, and what they contributed? (I know Buscema and DeZuniga, obviously.)

[ozaline]

I guess a group of inkers, including DeZuniga https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribe

[tripodeca113]

They managed to capture the actors likeness, much better than other comic adaptions.

[alicemacher]

Such gorgeous art. I like the blue tints in the Kansas scenes.

One thing that's always nagged at me from the film is that the Miss Gulch vs. Toto bit is never resolved. Unless we're meant to take what happens to her "dream" counterpart as Dorothy's unconscious providing symbolic wish-fulfillment. Though I doubt the screenplay writers had Freudian psychology in mind there.

[ozaline]

That is something that the most commonly staged play version of the movie, written by the Royal Shakespeare Company, does try to address, stating that she was hurt in the storm and that Toto wasn't really a priority for her at that point. Which is not perhaps the best message. If Glinda was trying to tell Dorothy she shouldn't run from her problems (a better moral than not looking for her heart's desire outside her tiny sphere), then "your problems will resolve themselves," is not the best thing to tack on to it, it is however some kind of resolution.

But of course that's a later revision anyway and doesn't address the text of the actual film. To my understanding the main reason the dream layer was added to the film was a belief that adult film goers would not be able to accept a fantasy story without having the film explain that fantasy away as a flight of fancy. In part owing to the poor reception of 1933's Alice in Wonderland (which is treated as a dream anyway, so I'm not sure how that helps).

If anything the dreamscape of Oz is more Jungian than Freudian, but I'm not sure how much thought was put into the ending.I know there were some dropped plot threads from previous iterations of the script, not sure if there's one there.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

So, why would they feel the need to collaborate on something like this?

[ozaline]

I'd have to dig it up again, but my understanding is it arose from Marvel deciding to do adaptations of the first three books that they'd believed to be in the public domain (in fact, only the first two were in the pubic domain which is why the third book was never released). At the same time DC was negotiating to do the movie adaptation. They learned of each other's plans, and decided that instead of making competing products they'd pool resources... That way they could share the licensing cost and Marvel could use the MGM designs for their other books.

[angelophile]

Thanks for sharing this. It's delightful. And a masterclass in showing a likeness without going uncanny valley about it.

[shadur]

Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in,
A grey Dustbowl girl from a land she was better of leavin'
She made her escape, went from gray into green,
And she could have got clear, she could've got clean,
But she chose to be good and return to that grey Kansas sky
Where colour's a fable and freedom's a fairy-tale lie...

-- Seanan McGuire, _Wicked Girls_

[laughing_tree]

Interestingly, they were so pressed for time in making this comic that Buscema, in those pre-VHS days, ended up drawing the whole thing from memory rather than wait for a script.