Fairy Tale Spotlight: John R. Neill - Author of Oz

Only three books. John R. Neill only wrote three canon Oz books, but they ended up being some of my favorites. Was he the best author? No. In fact, Baum could writer circles around him. But the reason he was good was because he broke a stagnant trend in the series perpetuated by Ruth Plumly Thompson. In short, the series had been growing stale for a long time.

But why was Neill's stories so disruptive? Well... the truth was that Neill had been seeing everything happening in all the stories since almost the beginning. He came in as the illustrator at the second book and remained the illustrator for a whopping forty-five books. By the time he was writing his own, he probably had a good idea what it looked like in his head.

Here's the thing though: Neill is not that great a writer. I love his three canon Oz books very much, but he is a better artist than he is an author. But who cares?! He knew how to make something entertaining, and that's something he accomplished well.

I got to thinking about what Oz would look like if it had been created by a cartoonist. Have you seen the old cartoons of the 30's and 40's? They are very strange. Everything is alive in them. Neill must have really liked this concept, because when he began writing his Oz books, that is the world that Oz had changed into. Everything turned into a chaotic cartoon where anything and everything was possible. His explanation? Magic. Yeah, that'll do.

Neill is not often loved for how he fundamentally changed how Oz exists, although giving them cars and creating highways for them to drive upon was not a bad thing. But he did some annoying things. He made it so the 5 sections of Oz, which had their own favorite colors, were now completely shaded in those colors. This would mean that the munchkins would have blue skin and the natives of the Emerald City would have green skin. A bit too tacky for me, I'm afraid.

But that mistake did not distract from the sheer cartoon chaos that exists in his lovely books. I love them. I really do. For a span of three years, he breathed life back into a series that was kind of dying a little. And as unfaithful as it was to the original vision of Baum... it was very welcome, at least to me.

If you are interested in his Oz books, they are as follows:

1. "The Wonder City of Oz"

2. "The Scalawagons of Oz"

3. "Lucky Bucky in Oz"

4. "The Runaway in Oz"

The last one was not canonized. It was not even published until 1995. It's really too bad. He finished the story but could not get to the illustrations. He passed away before he could... and the publishers decided not to take it.

Thank you, John R. Neill. You did a good thing.

This blog was written on July 18, 2022.

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