November 12 was the birthday of illustrator John R. Neill (1877-1943), primarily associated with L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.
While W.W. Denslow had illustrated many of Baum’s earlier stories, such as Father Goose: His Book (1899), Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) and most significantly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the two broke up over royalty negotiations on the original Broadway show The Wizard of Oz (1902), which Denslow had designed sets and costumes for. Neill, who had drawn original comics for the Philadelphia North American, as well as the original serialized version of Baum’s adventure novel The Fate of a Crown, was brought aboard for The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), which foregrounds a completely different set of characters from The Wizard of Oz, with some of the original ones returning later in the story. Neill went on to illustrate 35 additional Oz books, including several more by Baum, all of Ruth Plumly Thompson’s, and three penned by himself. A fourth written by Neill but unfinished, was published in 1995, edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower (who also illustrated our friend Edward Einhorn’s two Oz books).
Neill also illustrated several non Oz-books by Baum, as well as editions of works by Longfellow, Poe, Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant, several by Harry Leon Wilson, and a 1908 version of the now-disfavored Little Black Sambo. He also sold illustrations to mahor magazines, such as The Ladies’ Home Journal, The The Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, and Boys’ Life.
One of Neill’s more interesting contributions to the Oz-iverse was to transform the character of Dorothy from a chubby-cheeked, bonneted little pioneer girl in the Little House vein, to a modernized, chic tween kid with a contemporary bobbed haircut. As the illustrator of the Marvelous Land of Oz, he is also responsible for the visual conceptions of the best known Oz characters following Denslow’s original batch, such as Jack Pumpkinhead, the Woggle-Bug, and Ozma. The Land of Oz characters were later incorporated into such films as Journey Back to Oz (1972), and Disney’s Return to Oz (1985).