WTalespinner

Stay tuned to this space, as we have the long-awaited return of a VERY popular comic! Two pages every Wednesday!

Actually, I've been running the livestream since last March, and we celebrate our 1st anniversary next month!

Set in my medieval fantasy homebrew world of Aerysia, six adventurers brave the trials and terrors of the continent of Lazaras! We also have fresh new campaigns starting up within the coming months! Drop me a line if you're interested in taking part! https://www.twitch.tv/talesofaerysia Our next session is scheduled for March 20th!

Coining a phrase from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", obviously... :)

...but I wanted to post this, on this Christmas Eve 2019, to assure everyone that Andrea and I are very much aware that this is usually the time when you would expect a new issue of "The Carnevillans of Oz".

Well, it is because of life and circumstances that I must tell you that 2019 will pass without a completed issue of the comic. Please accept our most sincere apologies...

...but that does NOT mean that you won't get a new issue in 2020! In fact, people who are contributing to my Patreon page at the $5.00 level("Carny") can tell you that the next issue is definitely a Work In Progress. In fact, as a perk of their donations at that level, they're getting to see black & white WIP pages as Andrea finishes them(two at a time, in fact!).

So "Carnevillans" is most certainly NOT dead! Just...delayed. Trust when I say that if the project was in any kind of trouble, you would be the first to know. So I hope you'll still be with us after the ball drops! See you all in 2020, Carnys! Oh...and Merry Christmas, too! ;) (PS: I haven't forgotten about Clowning Touch 2, either. )

OZ: HEART OF MAGIC

Written by Terry Kavanagh

Art by Marcelo Mueller

Colors by Leonardo Paciarotti

Story by Dave Franchini & Terry Kavanagh

(IMPORTANT NOTE: This review is infested with SPOILERS!)

Zenescope’s flagship franchise…”Grimm Fairy Tales”…evolved into a number of offshoot titles centered around one of the public domain fairy tales they took their inspiration from in creating a host of modern-day stories in which the principal characters from those stories are more grown-up and badass versions of the original concepts.

There was also a horror element to the early stories, but this distinction has more or less waned in favor of epics that have a dash of sex and ultraviolence to go with their adapted narratives(although the Grimm Tales of Horror series upholds the horror emphasis).

Each of the main realms of the Grimm Universe, as it came to be called, corresponds to a popular fairy tale realm. Alice’s Wonderland, Peter Pan’s Neverland, and so forth. It took a bit of time, but L. Frank Baum’s land of Oz eventually joined the flock in the latter half of the Volume 1-based run of the main Grimm Fairy Tales comics. In the dichotomy of the realms, Oz was dubbed the realm of Hope.

My own experience with Oz is hit and miss…and, sadly, most of it was miss. The first Oz series was the best of these. It told a decent story which established how the characters and situations of Zenescope’s version of Oz would be presented. Joining a somewhat babed-up and adolescent version of Dorothy Gale is a big white wolf version of her little dog, Toto, a sentient Scarecrow, a robot-based take on the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion is presented here as a shamed member of an anthropomorphic race of feline warriors called the Kavari. The green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West was an Anakin Skywalker-esque woman named Zamora, they had a somewhat scantily-dressed take on Glinda, and a furry anthro rat…which the Glinda chapter of the Tales of Oz revealed was once a human man…was presented as the resident Wizard.

The second series was an anthology of sorts. The Tales of Oz were prequel stories…plus a nice, three-part bonus story revealing Toto’s origins…which gave more of an in-depth on each of Dorothy’s friends and allies, including an original character called Adraste who is Glinda’s protégé. The Tales series was…a touch extreme in showing the origins of these characters, but that’s to be expected of a Grimm Fairy Tales-related comic.

The downward spiral began, however, with the follow-up series Warlord of Oz, which introduced the eponymous menace as some big, bad, demon-augmented dude covered in a suit of cheesy armor, and he wields some kind of superpowered sword.

This series also teased that Dorothy herself would go bad, and anyone who knows me knows that I HATE when Dorothy is made evil, no matter what the in-story justification.

This led to a single comic…a one-shot…which to date goes down in comics history as being the single worst comic to feature the land of Oz ever written, hands-down. This being the Age of Darkness Oz One-Shot. Following this was a five-part prequel series called Reign of the Witch Queen.

It got to the point where I actually feared to pick up another Zenescope Oz title, but I nevertheless gave a one-shot called Oz: The Wizard a try when the root Grimm Fairy Tales series began its Volume 2 stories.

And whaddya know. I actually liked it! Said story had Dorothy’s benign reign interrupted by an evil Wizard whose powerful illusions lock her in a blue-skinned, elf-eared appearance which I immediately fell in love with. Said Wizard then assumes Dorothy’s visage, and accuses the real Dorothy of trying to murder her, effectively turning her into a fugitive(albeit one with allies…Thorne, Toto, and a handful of Emerald City guards are not duped by the switcheroo).

This cliffhanger ending, however, was meant to set up a future Oz story which would take a few months to materialize.

When it did, it turned out to be this five-issue story, put together by a Black Panther comics veteran named Terry Kavanagh. The gist is obvious: Dorothy has to try and clear her name, while keeping the nefarious Wizard from achieving excavations to find the eponymous artifact at the expense of a great deal of Oz real estate, including the Emerald City itself. They also need to find out what happened to Glinda and Adraste, both of whom went missing in action prior to the Wizard’s coup.

Now what I was expecting out of the story was that we’d see Dorothy try to use her illusionary appearance to her advantage. In my knowledge of Zenescope’s version of Oz, there is indeed a blue-skinned, elf-eared race, and according to Zenescope writer Dave Franchini(who wrote "Oz: The Wizard), they're called the Qobians. I figured that at some point during this series, we’d re-acquaint ourselves with this race, and Dorothy would begin to gather up an army from this fundamental basis.

What we get instead, here, is something that…surprise, surprise…is a little more in line with Zenescope versions of other characters from the original Oz books, which was quite frankly a welcome surprise seeing as how Zenescope’s boys have been kinda-sorta taking their cues from the endlessly-spammed 1939 MGM movie basis. We’re treated to a big, and much more noble version of the Nome King here(and…a family man??), and among Dorothy’s companions that are in with her makeshift resistance faction are a cybernetic…and much more flippant…version of Captain Fyter(from The Tin Woodman of Oz), and Jinjur, the leader of a group of amazon warriors called the Jinjurians(Jinjur was a munchkin antagonist from the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz). Assisting the villainous Wizard is a woman who is revealed to be Ann Soforth, the Queen of the apparently slighted realm of Oogaboo. She’s tasked with duping the Scarecrow…called Bartleby in the series…into thinking the woman he loved, who was murdered by Zamora in his Tales of Oz story, has returned.

Dragons…including a more nasty, Zenescoped version of Baum’s Quox, from Tik-Tok of Oz…also show up here.

Oh…and a blond version of a certain halfbreed fairy ruler…presented as a thankfully benevolent and godlike being here(other writers seem to want to play her up as a snippy nationalist)…shows up in the last two issues.

But for everything that was good about this series, I’m still bothered by the missed opportunities to have made Dorothy’s life in Oz so much more…interesting. And yes, I’m griping here about the final-issue decision to completely restore the chararcter’s root appearance. I mean, I get it…she risked her life to bring back two main characters who went missing(Glinda and Adraste, who were duped into a kind of life-draining statsis), and all of her allies returned the favor to bring her back. I also completely appreciated the fact that Dorothy took a pacifist approach to her crusade throughout her travails, which blessedly solidifies the fact that she’s beyond that miserably corrupt period we had to see her suffer through during the Reign of the Witch Queen series.

Now I should note that while I said I fell in love with Dorothy’s new look(and an Instagram inquiry showing off one of the covers of Issue 2 proved I wasn’t the only one), I was hardly advocating that she should keep that hex-enforcing collar around her neck. I don’t mind Dorothy being the spell-slinging riot grrl that Zenescope apparently wants her to be at all(and I should note that she can STILL be that kind of character no matter how different she looks!). But for the fact that the Wizard proved to be a considerable improvement over that horrendous(and, quite frankly, overpowered) Warlord antagonist, he should have been given some kind of takeaway in having Dorothy locked in the form he gave her, minus the collar. Some condition to the spell he cast. Remove the collar, the form becomes real. I might also bring up the notion that giving Dorothy a different physical appearance makes Zenescope’s version of the Dorothy Gale character effectively unique. It’s a version of Dorothy they could have truly called their own, and her not looking human anymore…effectively becoming one of the native species of Oz, in fact, without letting it affect her altruistic and pacifistic persona...gives her a lasting conundrum as a character. An undercurrent and a reminder that she invested so much of herself into Oz to the point where she permanently sacrifices her birth appearance. It’s a conundrum that she could potentially and ironically grow to accept, too.

But given the fact that this version of Dorothy, with her Buffy-esque dialogue(and I'm NOT a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, sorry), kept complaining about “the body that isn’t mine”, I suppose I should have foreseen that this illusion would be undone, but they didn’t actually do anything with it before that happened. The Qobians were completely absent. All they did with the concept was to have her illusionary look serve as grist for a dumb blueberry joke during a dream sequence in Issue 2. I also didn’t appreciate the fact that she spent the entire series hiding most of this new look in a gray, hooded robe(and before you get any misconceptions, I would have been fine with Dorothy at least keeping the hood down, or ditching the hood entirely. I’m not the sort of comic reader who demands that all female characters be dressed and ready for a striptease). Hey…I was so taken with that new look, I put cover artist Sean Chen’s blue Dorothy caricature on his Issue 2 cover up as my Windows 10 lockscreen image.

Now that the series is over, I’m thinking of taking it down in bitter disappointment over its passing. I just have to think of a better image to replace it with.

So in summation, I don’t hate the Heart of Magic series outright. I certainly don’t hate it as much as I did the Age of Darkness One-Shot or Reign of the Witch Queen, but I feel the same way about the admittedly rushed ending as I did about the ending of the 1939 MGM movie. You know…the one where studio politics dictated that Dorothy’s entire Oz adventure was nothing more than a fever dream? They apparently did that because they thought straight fantasies wouldn’t sell.

I disagree, of course, but…whatever.

I don’t buy these new Oz stories, Zenescope or otherwise, wanting to hate them. I actually want them to be good. To give me something interesting. Especially Zenescope, and they seem to be the only ones putting out new Oz comic stories on an apparently annual basis these days, and if the wonderfully colorful and detailed visuals throughout this series is any indication, they’re a good brand to get behind.

But just once…just once…I want to be able to pick up a Zenescope Oz comic series, and not come away disappointed once the story concludes. I had to swallow a bitter pill over the decision to make the Tin Man a bad guy with the first Oz series, I had to deal with the fact that I actually paid for the Oz Age of Darkness One-Shot, and I had to accept that the Oz: The Wizard One-Shot was nothing more than a tease for the ultimately disappointing Heart of Magic series.

But, if such a denouement doesn’t bother you, and you’re as much a fan of Baum’s Oz books as I am, the Heart of Magic series is an easy recommend.