The Wizard of Oz holds a special place in popular culture as one of the most popular playgrounds in which creators have had a lot of fun. Growing up, I enjoyed reading the original books and watching the 1939 film, but it’s with media like the surprisingly dark 1985 Return to Oz film or the 1978 film adaptation of The Wiz – with its interpretation of the Black experience – where my imagination was truly captivated with the possibilities.

Every few years, I’d watch the latest made-for-TV movie based on the intellectual property. I’ll admit that 2007’s Tin Man, with all its weirdness, still has a special place in my heart.

With this in mind, enter The O.Z.

Standing for “The Occupied Zone,” The O.Z. (written by David Pepose, illustrated by Ruben Rojas) is a comic miniseries that takes us to the land of Oz after Dorothy has left, sculpting it into a realm not uncommon with a lot of genre media nowadays: What if X but in a contemporary war zone?

We meet a new Dorothy Gale, the original Dorothy’s adopted granddaughter, who is a veteran of America’s never-ending wars. She’s dealing with her own trauma by staring down the barrel of her own sidearm. A surprise tornado sends her into a war-torn Oz where the ruins of a village are being bombarded by a litany of fantastical villains. We learn that in the power vacuum left by the Wicked Witches, the Scarecrow has become a new tyrant and started an authoritarian regime to keep control over the lands. It’s only by being dragged from the conflict by a militarized Tin Woodsman that Dorothy is able to escape and enter the Resistance.

I had some conflicted feelings reading The O.Z. Even though I’m always hungry to bite into a new rendition of Oz, I felt there were some elements that failed to be respectful to the gravity of its own subject material. There stands an argument to make for America’s involvement in forever wars as a “a bad thing,” but it’s an argument the comic would refuse to listen to.

Instead, we’re visually bombarded with the heavy yellow tones of the setting, playing up the TV trope where the moment you’re in a “third-world country,” a yellow filter is tacked on. This is further hammered home by the protagonist fitting the damaged warrior cliché. The originality truly wears thin the more you realize it’s just paint-by-numbers military porn with the magical land of Oz as the setting du jour.

From the yellow tone to the robed attire to the ramshackle buildings, it’s easy to see the influences from contemporary media on depictions of “war zones” when depicting this new Oz.

Now, I could be jumping the gun on the theme of the series. This could be the setup of a deconstruction of pro-military style media where Dorothy realizes she was given a bad bill of sale, that going to Iraq would let her be a hero instead of a cog in the industrial military complex, and that the O.Z. lets her play the role of hero she desperately longed for. In this version, the fantasy land lets her play out her own fantasies and could be a setup to realizing the shallowness of the whole affair.

However, there’s not a drip of irony in this entire issue. Dorothy falls into a world desperate for a foreign interloper to go and kick ass, and she is more than willing to fit that role. By making the direct parallel of Iraq to The O.Z., the creators get to live out a war fantasy in which they blow up flying monkeys and scarecrows and don’t have to worry that maybe we’re the baddies.

In the end, the premise seemed fun at first, but that’s honestly my white neoliberal upbringing showing. There’s been a lot of revisionist history and attempts to rehabilitate legacies when it comes to the last 20 years of wars in the Middle East, and it’s something the United States as a whole has oddly embraced.

We desperately want to be the good guys, despite literally committing war crimes on civilians and imprisoning and torturing human beings in nightmarish settings like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. The O.Z. joins in on that tradition of rehabilitation, whether intentional or not.

Either way is harrowing.