When L. Frank Baum wrote 'The Wizard of Oz', he expected it to be a standalone novel, published under the slightly different title of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. As his introduction here points out, the fans wouldn't stand for that so he wrote a  sequel, 'The Marvelous Land of Oz', breaking almost all the rules we hold sacrosanct about sequels today. Later editions abbreviated that title to merely 'The Land of Oz' and that's how it's generally published today.

For one, it took him a while. 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' came out in 1900 but it was four years of waiting for those fans to finally read this sequel in 1904. After that, he was off and running and the series had expanded to twelve books by the time he died in 1919, two more published soon after to comprise the original run, along with a few other stories and a bunch of crossover novels that are not considered 'Oz' books but are nonetheless set in a shared fictional universe. Immediately after Baum's death, publisher Reilly & Lee brought in Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue it, her opening contribution seeing print in 1921. She wrote a book a year until 1939 and then others continued on from there to comprise what's known as the Famous Forty.

For another, there's no Dorothy. If there's anything worse, from a fan's perspective, than having a long wait for a sequel—just mention 'The Winds of Winter' to a George R. R. Martin fan—, it's the end of that wait being met by new characters instead of the ones they've screamed for. The cover art of the first edition might accurately point out that this brings back the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, but there's no Dorothy at all. There's no Lion either, but I don't know if he had as many fans in 1904 as she did.

Instead, the lead character here is Tip, short for Tippetarius, a Gillikin orphan. Who the heck is he, you might fairly ask, and you'll get quite the answer by the end of this book. For now, he's a young man being raised by Mombi, who's a witch under any other name, effectively for legal reasons. He makes a Jack Lantern out of a pumpkin, as so many kids still do for Hallowe'en, but he also builds a body for it to scare Mombi. He calls his creation Jack Pumpkinhead. Of course, Mombi isn't fooled in the slightest, so tests out her new powder of life on it, bringing it to life. She'll have Jack work for her and turn Tip into a marble statue for his effrontery.

Instead, Tip and Jack run away to the Emerald City and steal the powder of life for good measure. I realise that Baum deliberately avoided moral messages in the first 'Oz' book and possibly the rest of them too, but there's so much subtext here that I found it impossible not to think about that. At this point, this read to me as lessons of responsibilities for gods, a kinda sorta holdover from book one given a heck of a lot more focus.

For instance, if you're going to create a sentient being—which, to be fair, wasn't Tip's intention—it might behoove you to give it ears so that it can hear when you talk to him. I say "him", because he is given the name of Jack, but he doesn't have any dangly bits to make the fundamentalists happy. And, if you're going to turn a sawhorse into a real horse with that magic powder, then ensure that it has legs with joints. Later in the story, a crucial moment makes it necessary to create something to fly them out of the mess they're in, so Tip creates a bird from a couple of sofas, a broom, some palm fronds, a bunch of ropes and the stuffed head of some sort of elk. It's called the Gump and it later asks to be undone because it never wanted to be alive. That's, like, deep, man.

Before long, as our party arrives at the Emerald City, it becomes a conversation about gender and women's rights. After the Wizard left in the first book, the city at the heart of Oz is now ruled over by the Scarecrow, who never really wanted the crown to begin with but does what he can. Outside the gates, however, is a revolutionary army of girls, led by Gen. Jinjur. It's impossible to read these scenes without associating them with the suffrage movement, and apparently Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a notable suffragist. In other words, he's on the side of the women, who promptly conquer the city armed with knitting needles and the knowledge that decent men wouldn't hit women.

What's odd is that Baum takes a surprisingly inconsistent approach. These girls are highly capable and Oz is quickly theirs, even if the battle is effectively four hundred revolutionaries against one guard. Knitting needles certainly have precedent as weapons, as I've learned from Prof. Theodoric Brandywine's panels on Victorian martial arts. And the city suffers because men prove particularly useless at basic domestic tasks hitherto reserved for women, like cooking and cleaning. However, a revolution deserves a counter-revolution and that's won by simply introducing mice, after which an army of capable girls runs screaming for the hills. That's cartoon logic.

You might be wondering when the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are going to show up, after I'd pointed out that they were on the cover of the first edition. Well, we meet the Scarecrow once we get into the Emerald City, where he bonds somewhat with Jack Pumpkinhead, given that they're a pair of sentient creatures brought to life from previously inanimate objects. Their initial scene is a surrealist dream because they speak the same language but communicate through an interpreter who's deliberately unreliable. After Gen. Jinjur's revolution, they flee to Winkie country where the Tin Woodman is now emperor, to seek his aid.

I should point out here that the Tin Woodman's name turns out to be Nick Chopper, which sounds a little like a straight-to-video slasher movie. And its porn adaptation. Of course, he's going to help his former comrade to retake the Emerald City and, after adventures and misadventures that fail to solve the problem, visit Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, who takes care of business, with a notable use of telegraphing to set up the glorious twist at the end of the book.

Another new character is introduced during those adventures and misadventures, many of them due to Mombi teaming up with Gen. Jinjur and using her magic to cast illusions remotely to cause confusion for our heroes. He's a human sized insect who goes by H. M. Woggle-Bug, those initials standing for "Highly Magnified" and referring not only to his physical size but his education, as he lived for a while in a schoolhouse learning with the children from Prof. Nowitall. In another superb moment of surreality, the professor put him under a microscope and projected him onto a screen, only to wander off at such a magnified size when a girl fell out of the window in shock.

There are other characters here too, but the episodic nature of these stories means that I have no real understanding of who's going to be important to the series or not. Baum introduces all these characters as characterful moments and I get the impression that he had no idea when he did so if any of them would continue beyond them. Right now, the only regulars are the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. Are they the most important to the series? I'll find out, I guess, as I read on.

And that leaves me to talk about the twist, which I don't want to do because it's the definition of a spoiler. So I won't talk about it, which means that I won't talk about all the subtext beneath it and what light that puts Baum into, given he wrote this in 1904. I do believe the character involved will return in the third book, given its title, so I guess I'll be able to talk about it there. At this point, I can only say that 'The Land of Oz' surprised me even more than 'The Wizard of Oz' did, and for a lot of different reasons, all of which make me eager to read on. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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