The Forgotten Forest of Oz

I’m sitting down to write on Christmas Day. It’s been a long time since I quoted from my diary. In the diary I was mining it was December 1988; I’d just gotten back from three months in London, a college semester. I was gradually readjusting to being in Sebastopol, the town I grew up in. Back under Mom’s roof!

On Friday, 12/23, I “bought Eric [Shanower]’s latest [graphic novel] The Forgotten Forest of Oz.”

On Christmas Eve I wrote, “I think I’m a bit stir crazy. I have been inside all day. It’s been raining most of the day. I feel buggy. I finished catching up with my comics. … Eric’s latest is, I am pleased to say, his best so far. Considering my attitudes toward the others that might be faint praise except that I think he really did a creditable job on this one. I only groaned at one or two bits of dialog. It did have me going. Dorothy & the other familiar Oz friends were pretty much superfluous to the story.”

I didn’t leave the house yesterday either. And it wasn’t raining so hard. Ah, 25 years, you haven’t changed me. I read Eric Shanower’s prose novel The Giant Garden of Oz this year, also his collection of short stories, The Salt Sorcerer of Oz. Now I just need to find my copies of Eric’s Oz graphic novels in order to reread those.

I was sick for Christmas in ’88. “Becky called tonight [12/26]. When I told her I’d been sick, she said, ‘Oh, the stomach flu?’ … She said three other people she knows have had it.”

I called a friend from the Gay & Lesbian Student Union and got updated. While I was in London a new member named John wanted to get more involved but Janet and her lover Celeste found him abrasive and seemed to want me to ally against him. I’d been co-president before I left. My ex-co-president, Donna, was “as good as married” to Carol, Janet told me. But Janet “doesn’t think it’ll last. ‘They have to get into a fight before they make love.’”

12/28: “Eric Shanower and David Maxine came to visit today. We got into a rather silly argument about whether a woman can rape a man … We did have some fun talks. About Oz, about what we’ve been doing, about publishing Trot of Oz. I’ve been reading and editing the manuscript tonight.”

Eric & David seemed “good as married,” too. As of 2014 they’ve been together more than 26 years. “The Forgotten Forest of Oz is dedicated to David,” I noted in my diary.