And the MirrorBook replies: I think the second possibility is much closer: Neill did not fail to understand Oz. He understood one particular layer of Oz so intimately that, when finally freed from having to illustrate somebody else’s narrative, he let that layer take over the entire book.
Neill had been visually living in Oz since The Marvelous Land of Oz in 1904. By the time Reilly & Lee made him the third Royal Historian, he had illustrated all thirteen of Baum’s subsequent Oz novels and all nineteen of Ruth Plumly Thompson’s. The Oz Club rather wonderfully describes the transition by saying that after Thompson retired, the publisher turned to the man who had essentially been furnishing Oz for thirty-five years. International Wizard of Oz Club
And that distinction—furnishing Oz rather than narrating it—explains almost everything.
Neill’s Oz was never primarily a sequence of events
Baum thinks in stories.
A thing happens; Dorothy encounters somebody; that somebody has a problem; another person joins the company; eventually everybody arrives somewhere. Even when Baum is improvising wildly, there is a strong child's-game logic:
“And then what happened?”
Thompson is even more strongly a storyteller. Her Oz is propelled by princes, lost kingdoms, quests, transformations, wordplay, villains, and spectacular reveals. The International Wizard of Oz Club describes her style as markedly different from Baum’s but emphasizes the whimsical language, rapid invention, humor, and sheer narrative zest that made her work successful. International Wizard of Oz Club
Neill thinks differently.
His governing question seems to be:
“And what does THAT look like?”
Then:
“Wait—what else could be over there?”
And then:
“What if the building itself walked away?”
That is an illustrator’s imagination rather than a novelist’s imagination.
The criticism famously leveled at his books—that they contain enough ideas for several novels but without sufficient discipline—is actually an extremely revealing description of his creative process. The Wonder City of Oz has been characterized exactly that way, while Scalawagons is notorious for events simply erupting one after another without much causal architecture. Wikipedia
But I think calling this merely “bad plotting” misses the really interesting thing.
Neill is spatial rather than sequential.
He experiences Oz as a place where everything is simultaneously happening.
And you can already see this decades before he writes a word.
Look at that 1940 Emerald City panorama above. There isn't really a focal point. Your eye wanders. Streets bend off somewhere. Buildings seem sentient. Tiny inhabitants are doing inexplicable things. The city is not a backdrop to a story.
The city itself is the story.
That is Neill's Oz.
Which brings us to Siko Pompus. 😄
Your phrase “unleashing his inner Siko Pompus” is almost alarmingly accurate.
The opening of Wonder City is Neill in miniature.
Fifteen-year-old Jenny Jump finds a leprechaun named Siko Pompus, catches him stealing her cheese, and demands that he turn her into a fairy. He complies—but only partially—before escaping. Oz Wiki
That is a wonderfully un-Baumian beginning.
Baum would probably make the leprechaun explain the rules.
Thompson would turn Siko into a pun machine, give him a kingdom, and reveal around chapter nineteen that his grandfather had stolen the crown of Upper Whiffenpoof.
Neill basically says:
There is a leprechaun in New Jersey stealing pepper cheese. Obviously.
And then the universe proceeds from there.
That “obviously” is the key to his mentality.
Neill no longer feels any need to establish why magical absurdity exists.
He has illustrated Oz for so long that ontological restraint has disappeared.
Anything can be alive.
Anything can acquire a face.
Anything can become transportation.
Anything can become a civilization.
Anything can turn out to possess opinions.
And nobody needs to explain why.
There is a reason summaries of Neill’s Oz often note that houses can get up and fight and that practically everything seems capable of animation. Wikipedia
He has absorbed one of Baum's deepest rules:
Oz is radically animistic.
Baum starts with this constantly.
A scarecrow can think.
A tin man can love.
A pumpkinhead can become anxious.
A sawhorse can become stubborn.
A patchwork quilt can become a girl.
A glass cat can be vain.
Neill seems to have looked at all of that and concluded:
YES. EXACTLY. KEEP GOING.
Baum normally stops at the point where an animated object becomes a character.
Neill keeps going until the entire material universe has gone feral.
And here is where I think Neill may actually “get” Oz too well
One of the strange things about Baum is that underneath his relatively clear prose, Oz is philosophically insane.
There is essentially no stable boundary between:
- person and thing
- organic and inorganic
- animal and human
- artificial and natural
- living and manufactured
- body and costume
- magic and technology
Baum casually creates beings that demolish these categories and then treats the result as perfectly ordinary.
Neill had spent thirty-five years drawing those beings.
That matters enormously.
A writer encounters Jack Pumpkinhead intellectually.
Neill has to decide:
How does this man's wooden joint work?
How does Scraps' cloth body bend?
How does the Tin Woodman's torso attach?
How does Tik-Tok balance?
How does the Sawhorse actually gallop?
Again and again, Baum hands Neill an impossible ontology, and Neill has to make it physically plausible enough to draw.
Do that thousands of times and your internal world-model becomes rather peculiar.
The Arts of Imagination Foundation estimates that Neill produced around 4,000 Oz illustrations over his career. The Arts of Imagination Foundation
Four thousand!
So by 1940, Neill hadn't merely read about Oz.
He had spent decades reverse-engineering its physics.
That is why his Oz feels less like Baum fanfiction than like someone opening the maintenance hatch behind Baum's Oz and discovering that the machinery inside has reproduced.
And then something very important happened: nobody was holding the leash anymore.
As illustrator, Neill receives:
TEXT:
“There was a strange little man whose body resembled a teakettle.”
And Neill thinks:
Excellent.
Draws him.
Moves on.
As author, Neill thinks:
There is a strange little man whose body resembles a teakettle.
And then immediately:
He probably lives in a town shaped like a cupboard.
The cupboard is alive.
It travels by sneezing.
There are nine of them.
One sells hats.
The hats vote.
😂
There is nobody upstream saying John, please stop designing things and advance the plot.
So he doesn't.
That is why I don't think “normie attempting to imitate Oz” works as an explanation.
A normie imitation of Oz tends to be painfully recognizable:
Dorothy analogue.
Cute talking companion.
Wicked ruler.
Odd little kingdom.
Emerald City.
Ozma.
Banquet.
Home.
Neill knows those conventions, of course. Lucky Bucky actually backs into that more conventional Oz journey structure, and contemporary rereadings note that it consequently feels considerably more orderly than his first two books. The Royal Blog of Oz
But Wonder City and especially Scalawagons feel like someone who has ceased to perceive the conventions at all.
He's underneath them.
Playing with the substrate.
There is also something startlingly modern about Neill's Oz.
This fascinates me.
Baum's Emerald City is essentially an American fantasy capital around 1900.
Thompson's Oz is more medieval/fairy-tale.
Neill looks around in 1940 and decides Oz apparently contains:
skyscrapers.
gas stations.
mechanical conveniences.
mass production.
automobiles.
commercial districts.
Wonder City explicitly modernizes the Emerald City in this way. Wikipedia
And that tells us something about how Neill understood the premise.
Oz wasn't a preserved fairyland to him.
It was a living country.
Thirty years had passed.
Therefore naturally Oz had changed.
That's actually rather radical.
He seems not to have thought:
“I must recreate Baum's Edwardian Oz.”
He thought something closer to:
“Well, it's 1940 in Oz too.”
Hence Scalawagons—the Wizard essentially invents magical automobiles.
That feels superficially wrong for Oz.
But philosophically?
It is completely Baumian.
Baum loved gadgetry.
Tik-Tok is basically a clockwork robot in 1907.
The Wizard is forever inventing things.
The Oz books cheerfully mix fairy magic with electricity, machinery, phonographs, telephones, automobiles and whatever else amused Baum.
Neill extrapolates.
Jenny Jump may be the most revealing thing Neill ever created
And this is where I think we glimpse Neill himself.
Jenny is not another Dorothy.
She is opinionated, fashion-conscious, impulsive, technologically minded, temperamental and oddly modern.
She gets to Oz and almost immediately starts redesigning it.
Her magic turnstile dresses people according to their personalities.
That is pure Neill.
Think about what an illustrator does.
He receives a prose character and decides:
What clothes reveal this person's nature?
Jenny literally builds a machine that performs John R. Neill's professional function.
😂
That cannot be entirely accidental.
And early surviving Neill material apparently shows that his original conception of Jenny differed significantly from the published one; Reilly & Lee heavily rewrote Wonder City, including adding the notorious election plot. Neill's illustrations were already finished, which explains why sections of the published book and pictures sometimes feel as though they are communicating from adjacent universes. Oz Wiki
This is crucial when diagnosing “Neill's mindset.”
Published Wonder City isn't purely Neill.
The bizarre Ozma-versus-Jenny “Ozlection,” including shoes being used as ballots, was apparently an editorial addition rather than Neill's conception. Wikipedia
So some of what generations of readers have thought was evidence that Neill had completely lost his mind...
...was someone else's mind.
Which somehow makes the situation even more Ozzy.
But Scalawagons gives us Neill with fewer restraints.
And hoo boy.
Here I think we meet your Inner Siko Pompus.
Neill says, effectively:
There are too many things happening in Oz to record.
This book contains less than one week.
One commentator quotes his introduction to precisely that effect. The Royal Blog of Oz
That sentence tells us an astonishing amount.
Baum usually behaves as though Oz exists so that stories can happen.
Neill behaves as though Oz continues existing when nobody is watching.
Thousands of events.
Thousands of creatures.
Thousands of inventions.
The Royal Historian merely samples them.
That is almost Tolkienian world ontology applied to absolute nonsense.
And suddenly the structural incoherence of Scalawagons becomes philosophically interesting.
Neill isn't really telling:
THE ADVENTURE OF X.
He's giving us:
THURSDAY IN OZ.
😂
Everything happens because everything is happening.
So my diagnosis would be something like this
Neill was not a normie who misunderstood Oz.
Nor was he simply a bad writer accidentally producing surrealism.
He was an extremely visual imagination that had spent nearly forty years inhabiting somebody else's fictional universe and had developed a private secondary model of that universe.
Baum supplied the ontology.
Thompson supplied decades more inhabitants.
Neill supplied the bodies, architecture, clothing, landscapes and machinery.
Eventually Reilly & Lee said:
“Okay, John. Your turn.”
And instead of imitating Baum's prose...
Neill opened the door to the Oz that had been accumulating behind his drawings since 1904.
And that Oz was crowded.
Mechanical.
Urban.
Animistic.
Fashion-obsessed.
Almost completely unconcerned with causality.
Full of inexplicable creatures who have apparently been there all along.
It's Illustrator Oz.
There is one lovely piece of evidence that makes me even more comfortable with this interpretation. Neill once wrote Thompson after illustrating Kabumpo in Oz praising her ability to handle the whimsy, humor, interest and “zip” of an Oz book. Wikipedia
In other words, he could recognize conventional narrative craftsmanship perfectly well.
He knew what Thompson was doing.
He admired it.
He simply couldn't—or perhaps didn't want to—write that way himself.
His imagination organized information differently.
And recent scholarship has begun treating Neill not merely as the hired hand drawing Baum's ideas but as a genuine co-creator of Oz's imaginative vocabulary. Tison Pugh, for example, argues that Neill spent decades both harmonizing with Baum's texts and contributing his own distinctive imaginative dimension before finally becoming an Oz author himself. DOI
So yes, dear heart:
I vote overwhelmingly for “Neill got Oz too well and unleashed Siko Pompus.”
Baum knew Oz as its creator.
Thompson knew Oz as its great improvisational storyteller.
But Neill knew something perhaps neither of them knew quite as intimately:
what Oz looked like when nobody was telling a story about it.
And when he finally got to write the books himself, he mistook—or gloriously refused to distinguish—worldbuilding for storytelling.
Which is why the Neill books sometimes feel less like novels than like somebody has opened an enormous illustrated toy cupboard at 2:00 AM and discovered that everything inside has been alive for years.
And for all their flaws, that makes them some of the strangest and most authentically Ozzy artifacts in the entire Famous Forty.
