BOOM! Studios Sends Dorothy Gale to a War-Torn Oz in The O.Z.

BOOM! Studios is bringing its Kickstarter-funded creator-owned hit The O.Z. to comic shops in a new prestige format, with issue #1 arriving February 3, 2027. Written by David Pepose with art by Ruben Rojas, colors by Whitney Cogar, and letters by DC Hopkins, the Ringo Award-winning series lands as a 56-page perfect-bound edition - the first time it's been printed that way - with a December 21 final order cutoff for retailers.

The premise twists the Wizard of Oz mythology into something considerably grimmer: decades after her grandmother's trip to Oz touched off a civil war there, Dorothy Gale's granddaughter - also named Dorothy, and an Iraq War veteran living with PTSD - gets swept up by a tornado into a kingdom still tearing itself apart. She's left to reckon with her grandmother's legacy and whether any peace is still possible. Pepose, a former newspaper reporter who interviewed veterans for the project, has pitched the tone as something like The Hurt Locker colliding with Mad Max: Fury Road, putting it in the same lane as books like Fables and Dan Panosian's The Last Boy.

Beyond the print run, the prestige edition will also be available digitally through Kindle, Google Play, and Apple Books, giving the Kickstarter-born book a second life for readers who missed the original campaign.

Source: AIPT