Follow the Yellow Brick Road back to your childhood!
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a modern day fairy tale. It has inspired so many writers and artists in the century since its creation that it is almost a genre in itself! What artist wouldn’t want to sink his or her teeth into such a variety of characters? In this coloring book, it’s your turn.
Like many authors of modern fantasy classics, L. Frank Baum drew inspiration from current events. Literary scholars and historians have made many connections between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the economy and politics of its decade. Baum’s yellow brick road is thought to represent the gold standard, and each major character has been linked to a specific figure of the 1890s. Baum’s editorial writings show his skepticism of the powerful and his admiration of independent thinkers who come from nothing to make their own fates. Naturally, he chose a children’s book artist who was also a political cartoonist, William Wallace Denslow, to illustrate his work (and several other works as well).
Denslow began sending cartoons to newspapers when he was only 16 years old. His versatile artistic skills brought him from lithographs and maps, to advertising and poster design, and finally to newspaper illustrations and cartoons, for which he earned international renown.
Finally, Denslow took on his own book projects, illustrating best-selling children’s books of Mother and Father Goose stories before collaborating with Baum on his most famous work. The two shared the copyright and profits of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which proved lucrative for them both.
Denslow and Baum went their separate ways in 1902 when they disagreed over the royalties of a stage adaptation, for which Denslow designed the sets, but by then he had made so much money from his share of the novels that he bought his own island in Bermuda and dubbed himself King Denslow I.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has seen many adaptations since it was first published it in 1900. Those immortal characters have been reimagined in three famous musicals, The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Wiz (1978), and most recently, Wicked (2003)—based on a novel of the same name (1995) that rebooted the famous Witches. It has been remade dozens of times in every media, from stage to film to television, and even games and comics. Baum himself was so captivated by his own creations that he went on to write 13 more novels about them.
In this coloring book, we return you to where it all began, the original illustrations, the beginning of the yellow brick road, if you will, where you can bring your own flavor to it once again.
Text from The Wizard of Oz paired with a modern take on original image
100 GSM Wood-Free, Acid-Free