Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz is a newspaper comic strip written byL. Frank Baum and illustrated byWalt McDougall, a political cartoonist for thePhiladelphia North American.Queer Visitors appeared in theNorth American, theChicago Record-Herald and other newspapers from 28 August 1904 to 26 February 1905.[1] The series chronicles the misadventures of theScarecrow, theTin Woodman, theWoggle-Bug,Jack Pumpkinhead, and theSawhorse, asthe Gump flies them to various cities in the United States.[2] The comic strip in turn produced its own derivation,The Woggle-Bug Book (1905).
Queer Visitors was formatted as a series of prose stories surrounded by large illustrations, and is therefore not a comic strip in the modern sense.
The project was designed to promote the 1904 novelThe Marvelous Land of Oz.[3] Coincidentally, it ran at the same time as a comic strip featuring Oz characters visiting America which was written and drawn byW. W. Denslow. Denslow drew the illustrations forThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz and shared in its copyright. After Baum and Denslow had a falling-out, Denslow exercised his copyright via his strip, calledDenslow's Scarecrow and Tin-Man, which ran in relatively few newspapers from December 1904 to March 1905—an artistic and commercial failure.[4]
The Visitors from Oz, published byReilly and Lee in 1960, includes about half of Baum's Visitors stories rewritten and illustrated by Dick Martin.
The 27Queer Visitors stories have been republished in part in book form asThe Third Book of Oz (1989) from Buckethead Enterprises, which omitted the outdated ethnic humor. The Buckethead edition was a reprint under a new cover of an earlier edition.The Third Book of Oz also includes another early promotion project,The Woggle-Bug Book (written by Baum and illustrated byIke Morgan); the 1989 volume is illustrated byEric Shanower.Hungry Tiger Press republished the stories with the original text but usedThe Visitors from Oz as the title, like the 1960 adaptation.
In June, 2009,Sunday Press Books released a collected edition of the newspaper strips in their original format and coloring. The book also includedW. W. Denslow's competing stripDenslow's Scarecrow And Tin-Man as well as other comic strips by Walt McDougall, W. W. Denslow, andJohn R. Neill.[5]
Ray Bolger recorded an audio adaptation of nineQueer Visitors tales, issued as "The Little Oz Stories." This was the fourth in a series of four audiotapes,The Oz Audio Collection, recorded by Bolger and issued byCaedmon Audio from 1976-1983.[6]
