It Payes to Have Personality (original) (raw)

Hiya, kiddos! I’ve done some more rereading recently, so today I’ll be going over the Oz work of Rachel Cosgrove Payes, the fifth official Royal Historian of Oz.


The Hidden Valley of Oz – The next-to-last in what I suppose are still considered the official forty Oz books, although nothing is ever really that simple, was also Rachel Cosgrove’s first book, from before she married Norman Payes; she’s credited as Rachel R. Cosgrove. And no, it’s not about salad dressing. It’s by-the-numbers in some respects, and not one of the more exciting books in the series, but it’s well-written and enjoyable. It starts with a boy from Ohio named Jonathan Andrew Manley, nicknamed Jam, flying to Oz on a kite and being hailed by some enslaved Gillikins as a sorcerer. It’s clearly a callback to the first Oz book, and the four major characters from that book are important characters here as well, as is the Hungry Tiger. The citizens of the Hidden Valley are so isolated that they’ve only heard of the Tin Woodman through rumors from birds. The most notable new character is Percy the Personality Kid, a white rat from Jam’s father’s laboratory who talks in slang and grows to giant size by eating a magic muffin. He seems to be a pretty polarizing character; I guess I can sort of see him as like Poochie from The Simpsons in being so clearly intended to be cool that it could get annoying, although he doesn’t give the impression of being created by committee. I think he’s fun, and I liked him more upon these rereads. It does, however, seem like there are times when the author wasn’t sure how to jazz up his dialogue and so just added “kiddo” to the end. Jam also brings along two guinea pigs, Pinny and Gig, who complete each other’s sentences and leave the party pretty soon. Much the same could be said about Spots, the Leopard with the Changing Spots, who is a great concept but doesn’t stick around that long.

The book has the general series of encounters with weird, hostile, often pun-filled communities that had become typical of the series. Terp, the giant in the Hidden Valley, wants to eat Jam; the Equinots want to keep him as a slave; the inhabitants of Bookville want to turn everyone into books; and the snowmen of Icetown want to freeze them. Cosgrove does a good job of having the characters get out of these situations with their own skills rather than coincidence or just running away: Percy gnaws his way out of a bookcase prison, Jam uses the Scarecrow’s straw to make a fire in Icetown, and the party gets the Gillikins’ help to trick Terp into getting himself trapped in a factory chimney.

The Scarecrow and Tin Woodman do manage to hypnotize the Guardian of the Muffin Tree REALLY easily, though. To give credit where credit’s due, I think John Bell pointed these things out when we discussed this book on the Regalia mailing list. The illustrator for this book was Dirk Gringhuis, credited as simply Dirk, whose style is serviceable but seems a bit plain and rough. Percy doesn’t really look much like a rat, and the Cowardly Lion’s face seems a bit off in this picture.

A working title for the book was Rocket Trip to Oz, as that’s how Jam originally got there, but Payes reported that the publisher “had rejected another manuscript which also used a rocket ship.” I suspect this would have been The Dinamonster of Oz by L. Frank Baum’s son Kenneth, but I don’t know for sure. There had already been one in Thompson’s Yellow Knight, although that one accidentally went down instead of up. And her later Yankee has its title character land in Oz in a space capsule. I kind of like the magical mundanity of a kite as Jam’s means of transport, although the rocket would have explained better why the Gillikins thought he had magic powers. The Collapsible Kite is able to talk once Jam gives him a face, but he doesn’t really do much in the story, and presumably loses the power of speech upon returning to Ohio. The original first chapter, with the rocket, is published in Volume 6 of Oz-Story Magazine.


The Wicked Witch of Oz – Rachel wrote this not long after Hidden Valley, but the publisher rejected it, their official reason being that Baum said there were no more witches in Oz. This is true, but he also went on to introduce some more anyway, as did Thompson and John R. Neill. And the Wicked Witch of the South is a character mentioned in Baum whose fate was unknown. Since there were no Oz books published by Reilly & Lee again until 1963, I have to wonder if it was more a monetary issue with the witch thing just being an excuse. It was finally published in 1993 by the International Wizard of Oz Club, which means it’s now the book’s thirtieth anniversary. I got Payes to autograph it at the Munchkin Convention the following year. A lot of the story features this Wicked Witch, Singra, who had just awakened from a hundred-year sleep imposed by Glinda. She’s certainly wicked, but also comes across as a bit ineffectual, and perhaps a bit of a slow thinker, although that could just be because Payes often details her thoughts and actions step-by-step when such isn’t really necessary. There’s a certain appeal to that kind of writing, but it also makes it seem geared toward even younger children than most of the Oz books. And I’m sure she’s out of sorts from being inactive for that long. Overall, though, there’s somewhat more pep to this one than Hidden Valley. Singra intends to turn Dorothy into a piece of cheese upon learning that the girl had killed her cousins, the Wicked Witches of the East and West. But not knowing what Dorothy looks like, she instead transforms Trot, and Dorothy and Percy track her down with the rat’s incredible sense of smell.

The cast is much more streamlined than in Hidden Valley, although the two do pick up another companion, Leon the Neon, who was turned into a living neon sign in an electrical accident. There’s definitely some overlap in the origin stories of Oz and superhero comic book characters.

In addition to the perspectives of the main heroes and the villain, we’re also shown how Ozma, the Wizard of Oz, and some of their other friends find out about and react to these events. Even though they have a lot of resources at their disposal to make unraveling the mystery fairly easy, it’s still fun to see how they work everything out. Singra turns out to have gotten in way over her head. An intriguing minor detail is a brief mention of a wicked wizard named Kizzo, who created the magic knitting needles Singra uses to enchant Dorothy. Eric Shanower illustrated this one, providing many detailed scenes, and using an actual rat as a model for Percy to avoid depictions like Dirk’s.

Both he and Singra show a lot of emotion in the drawings; and Dorothy, Trot, and Betsy Bobbin wear more contemporary outfits.

There are some timeline questions raised by Eric including in a crowd scene his own character Flicker, introduced in Ice King. which was published before this one but written well after.


Percy and the Shrinking Violet – This short story Rachel contributed to Oz-story brings back the Personality Kid for a third time, natch. And here Eric makes him more fashionable by having him wear a bow tie. The plot involves Violetta, the jealous ruler of an island in Lake Lavendra in the Gillikin Country, enchanting Ozma by sending her a violet that causes her, as well as Percy and Jellia Jamb, to slowly shrink. The rodent has to find the antidote on Violetta’s island. It’s worth noting that Shrinking Violets appeared in Jack Pumpkinhead, although there they only work if ingested, and wear off eventually. Jinnicky must have had a weaker variety. Other details I found interesting are that Violetta took her magic from a cottage belonging to Jessamine, an old witch who disappeared while casting a spell; Jellia eats a cereal called CheeriOz; and Lake Lavendra is shown on the map in Eric’s Adventures to be on the eastern side of the Gillikin County, near the Kalidahs’ forest.


Spots in Oz – Appearing in Volume 3 of Oz-story, this one features Payes’s second most notable creation, the Leopard with the Changing Spots. The plot kicks off when a Winkie girl nicknamed Taffy, jealous of the chemistry set her twin brother Fudge received for their birthday, sabotages the spot remover he’s making. It ends up removing ALL the spots in the area, and the Leopard happens to be around when it happens, in the company of the Hungry Tiger. When he’s unable to use his spots to express himself, he becomes much more talkative. I wonder if Herbertha the Herb Lady is related to Herby the Medicine Man.

Payes’s creations haven’t gotten that much play in fanfiction, probably because they’re still under copyright and somewhat obscure. Jam appears in Henry Blossom’s Blue Emperor, and I’ve read that this was because Blossom figured he was the latest kid to have adventures in Oz. He’s actually left with a way to return to Oz at the end of Hidden Valley, but he doesn’t use it in this book. And Ray Powell’s Raggedys has Percy disenchant Ruggedo out of curiosity, and get punished for it by being turned back into a regular-sized rat and banished from Oz, at least until the more recent edits. He also plays a significant role in the round robin story from the 2012 Oziana.