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FAIRY TALE ART SERIES | L. Frank Baum's 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' | PART 1 "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife."

I'm really excited to start sharing the follow-up to my previous fairy tale designs with Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid. I went back and read through the entirety of L Frank Baum's novel, and followed pretty closely to physical descriptions he described, but still left a lot to my own imagination and personal tastes.

To start off the series of designs, here is my own interpretation of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. I stuck to Baum's visual description of the pair - their colors sapped by Kansas living, in contrast to Dorothy. I originally kept her out of this image, but decided to include her to show the visual difference between them and her.

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I've seen a lot of people lately harping about how "Wicked isn't canon to the Oz universe", "it's just glorified fanfiction", etc., and I can't express how silly that is, and how annoyed it makes me every time I hear it, lol. Baum's original Oz books were never meant to be some canonical series — they contradict each other constantly; Baum called it a "fairy story" with loose cohesion at best; and it only became a series at all because the first one got popular enough that Baum felt a duty to the fandom to keep making more (even after he had wanted to end it). And the 1939 film is every bit as much "fanfiction" as Wicked — it changes the story in both major and minor ways, including a complete shift of framing (i.e., making Oz into a dream rather than a real place).

Maguire's great contribution to the overarching legacy and lore of Oz was to harmonize the very weak "canon" of the older works with a different shift in framing: recontextualizing all of the prior Oz material as a revisionist history (going off of Baum's own idea framing of himself as a "Royal Historian of Oz"), and attempting to tell "the true story" behind the other works (fictively of course — we're never meant to literally think Maguire's version preceded Baum's, irl). In literary studies, this is called an urtext. The Wicked Years and its adaptations are as much "fanfiction" as the 1939 film: it's just self-aware of that fact in a way that earlier works weren't, and uses that perspective to deconstruct the material and explore deeper (and darker) themes — not simply adapting or reimagining the original text (as the 1939 movie did), but actively challenging it; interrogating it. It's not meant to be "canon" as such: it asks you to ask whether (and why) there is such a thing, and what that might say about the stories that we are meant to literally believe in, in real life.