Generally, I hate when people feel the need to re-imagine a good classic, it's usually pretty bad. There has been a huge influx of this lately with movies. But think about it - are they ever really good? I mean was The Wiz good?
Really?
Or Return to Oz? I liked how fun and dark it was, but still.
The sad truth is that no matter how much I hate the remakes or prequels or "what-happened-after-Dorthy-left-Oz" reflections, I still can't resist watching them.
Tin Man? Yep. Watched it.
All.
Three.
Days.
Bloody Hell. I mean Alan Cumming is always a treat and Kathleen Robertson was a pretty great evil bitch...er, witch. But I just wasn't into it. Sure, it was fun to look for all the subtle references to the original, but Zooey Deschanel didn't do it for me. Or maybe it was the way they referred to Oz as "The O.Z." Blech. The magic was lost.
But there is hope...
Hope for Wonderland and dear Alice. A few years back at Comic-Con, we ran across a guy hawking his story. Now if you have never been to Comic-Con, what you need to know is there are the mammoth booths for every movie and publishing house known to man - complete with multi-million dollar booth extravaganzas. And then there are the indie guys sitting at modest little card tables armed only with their own passion and maybe a few sketches. That year, Frank Beddor was one of them. We liked the sketches and his passion as he told us the plot was infectious. He didn't even have the book to sell yet, but hoped he'd be getting a publisher soon. I kept my eye out for the book to appear.
Frank hooked me with a re-imagining of Wonderland...
His story is called The Looking Glass Wars and I fell for it. Thank GOD I fell for it. This story is great. I'll let the description from their website do it justice:
Alyss Heart, heir to the Wonderland throne, was forced to flee through the Pool of Tears after a bloody palace coup staged by the murderous Redd shattered her world. Lost and alone in Victorian London, Alyss is befriended by an aspiring author to whom she tells the surreal, violent, heartbreaking story of her young life only to see it published as the nonsensical children’s sojourn Alice in Wonderland. Alyss had trusted Lewis Carroll to tell the truth so that someone, somewhere would find her and bring her home.
But Carroll had got it all wrong. He even misspelled her name! If not for the intrepid Hatter Madigan, a member of the Millinery (Wonderland’s security force) who after a 13 year search eventually tracked Alyss to London, she may have become just another society woman sipping tea in a too-tight bodice instead of returning to Wonderland to battle Redd for her rightful place as the Queen of Hearts.
It is a series of books, with two out currently:
It's made it to the New York Times best seller list, and I have heard tell there will be a movie, so read it now before it has the chance to be ruined for you by Hollywood.
Also included in the new mythos is a comic series called Hatter M.
It's drawn by Ben Templesmith who is most known for the creepy gothic look he brought to the comic series 30 Days of Night. It's a great story following Hatter M, the royal bodyguard who is on the search for Alyss all over Victorian London and elsewhere in our world. Great art, really fun.
And then one more for the road...
If that isn't enough Wonderland for you, there is another great story to keep you as high as a field of yummy rainbow mushrooms and laughing daisies.
Wonderland
This series - by Tommy Kovak and Sonny Liew - let's us see what happened in Wonderland when Alice left. And not Carrol's Alice, but Walt Disney's cute little blonde. In this Wonderland, that blonde is The Alice Monster, the White Rabbit is as neurotic as ever, the Queen of Hearts still has a penchant for taking off heads and there is a lovely little maid named Mary Ann who gets herself in more than a few misadventures. It's published by the fun and quirky indie company Slave Labor Graphics. The art is amazing and as colorful as the aforementioned mushroom field. Really whimsical. It's not a long series, so pick it up and have a short fix of fun!
At any rate, maybe Lewis Carroll's story just lends itself to imaginative new stories...maybe it was so dreamy it was able to create the perfect kind of fan fiction - the kind we actually want to read. The kind that creates new stories, new dreams and keeps the door open to worlds we love for just a while longer.
I'd like to think L. Frank Baum did the same. I mean his original books were so magical. So why is it that OZ is a hard place to go back to and actually enjoy? Is the movie just so prolific and so much a part of how our brains imagine the world that we just can't see beyond it? Did Hollywood ruin a good story AGAIN?
