Writer – Steven Ahlquist
Artist – Mike Sagara

Oz Squad’s regular series takes a little bit of a break to give readers this truly delightful special called Little Oz Squad. Taking its cue from Little Archie and those Harvey digests of yore, it looks and reads just like one of those books, which, frankly, is fantastic. The book is made up of two stories, the first being called “Double Trouble,” which features little Dot Gale creating a robot double to do the things she does not want to do such as eating liver for dinner. Robot Dot Gale, though, soon gets a mind of her own and wants to take over Dot’s life. The Oz Squad tries their best to stop the robot, but it all comes down to something that Robot Dot Gale could not process, that being a haiku, and the problem takes care of itself. This first tale is exceptionally fun, with the artwork by Mike Sagara being top-notch. The character designs are perfect, with Dot being cute as a button, Lion and Scarecrow both adorable, and Nick Chopper both hilarious and fitting as the boy Tin Man. “The Ballooniverse” is the second story in the book, in which the team heads to space to save Queen Enflaté from the evil villain, Pincushion Man. Said bad guy is aboard his Star Destroyer-like ship, the Sky Hook, which is shaped like a giant needle, and he is heading towards Enflaté’s area of the galaxy to pop them all. Writer Steven Ahlquist serves up another enjoyable tale, this one a little more on the risqué side of things, but only just slightly. Queen Enflaté, who is made of balloons, is very well endowed to the point she looks slightly ridiculous, but funny as well. Whether kids would notice that kind of thing is unknown, but older readers definitely would. That being said, the Oz Squad is beamed aboard her ship so that they might help defeat Pincushion Man, and they do just that. Altogether, this book was entertainment at its finest. Each of the stories was a lot of fun, though the first was better than the second. It is a shame that this was not a proper miniseries or even an ongoing, but one can see why it was not. The audience might be there for a single issue, but banking on a returning audience for something unproven is hard to justify, even if it does feature characters from The Wizard of Oz. The book may not have furthered any of the main titles’ plotlines, but it did provide respite from the more serious nature that it usually sports, and it did so quite wonderfully.

3.5 out of 5