Yee-haw!

I am unreasonably excited to get more of the Legend of Oz: Weird West series from Big Dog Ink.

There's a lot of Oz floating around right now thanks to I believe the copyright expiring. There's the new movie (Entertaining and pretty, but I didn't think it was fantastic), the Marvel series of comics (my sister has the whole lot as released so far and I really need to borrow them, according to her) and a few other things, but this was definitely the one that caught my interest the most.

To be fair, it combines two things I love in a beautiful package. As a kid, I got an intense love of SF/F from my parents and a love of westerns from my grandmother, next to whom I think I must have watched every John Wayne movie ever made. There's a beautiful comfort in westerns for me. So you can see why Deep Space 9 is my favorite Star Trek (come on, a frontier western in SPACE? I was SO there) and why this book appeals to me as well.

The second volume is coming out in a few months, but I'm not sure I can recommend the first one enough. The art is beautiful, the story is pretty faithful to the idea and feel of the Oz books (at least as I remember them from my childhood), but the liberties taken to adapt the story as a western were also very clever (The Tin Man is a sheriff with his tin star? cha-ching!)

Bonus, there's also a Scarecrow mini coming out, and if there's one character in this take on Oz that I liked better than the others, it's the Scarecrow (who is usually my least favorite - I was always more of a Tin Man fan :) ) Seriously, if you have a chance, check them out. They're pretty AND fun.