The cards have been largely Neill-centric until now... that's because John R. Neill is hands-down my favorite Oz illustrator, although the quality and style of his work varied wildly from book to book. Sometimes he was too ornate for his own good... and sometimes you could tell he was just rushing through a job. But on the balance, his depictions of the Oz characters are the best, even though lots of illustrators have followed.
But the man who started it all was W.W. Denslow, and you'd be kooky not to like his stuff. He was as much a designer as an illustrator, and his work for the first book in the series is seamlessly woven into the text. His Wizard, when seen as he intended it to be seen, is a thing a beauty and a marvelous achievement.
This doesn't make me like his renderings of Dorothy any better. But here is a Denslow illustration that reflects his contribution to the series: without W.W. Denslow, it's likely that we would not be talking about The Wizard of Oz today.
The number on this card currently coincides with the ten of swords in a Tarot deck. On second thought, I should probably change that number to 15, which coincides with The Devil, which is more often associated with bondage and enslavement... to addictions and to the material world. There'll be time for revisions later on, and I expect to make a good few.
-- Freder.
www.ducksoup.me
