I did not arrive at Chris Dulabone through an Oz bibliography. I arrived at him through Robert Evans.

While Robert and I were discussing his older Oz work and what a future collaboration might look like, he kept mentioning a friend named Chris. Then Robert gave me the detail that changed the story from a footnote into something I wanted to investigate properly.

Robert was talking about Abducted to Oz, one of two Oz books credited to Robert J. Evans and Chris Dulabone that are preserved through Project Gutenberg. Robert said the opening was his, that Telly was his contribution, and that Chris wrote material involving the parade, the Woozy, the Hungry Tiger and Jeanne-Marie. He also remembered Chris wanting badly to continue the story with a sequel.

That collaboration was not an isolated experiment. Once I started researching Dulabone, I found a creator who had spent decades doing something much larger: building an independent publishing identity inside Oz while helping other writers build there too.

Who was Chris Dulabone?

Christopher Michael Dulabone was born in 1964 and became one of the most prolific independent Oz writers and publishers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The International Wizard of Oz Club’s retrospective on his life describes an early fascination with writing, a manual typewriter, tiny photocopied Oz publications made with his brother Dana in the late 1970s, and eventually a much more ambitious publishing operation.

The scale matters because Dulabone was not simply releasing his own sequels. He published other authors, translations, rare Oz-related material, young writers, collaborative projects and books that might otherwise never have reached readers. In 1998 he rebranded his publishing operation as Tails of the Cowardly Lion and Friends, continuing to release new work for years afterward.

Read the International Wizard of Oz Club retrospective on Chris Dulabone →

1986 was not an accidental starting point

The timing is important. According to the Oz Club, The Emerald City of Oz—Baum’s sixth Oz novel—had just entered the public domain when Dulabone launched Buckethead Enterprises in 1986. Earlier in the century, writers trying to continue Oz faced a very different environment because much of the original series remained protected.

That history is essential to understanding what Dulabone was doing. He did not step into a fictional universe where every possible Oz element was suddenly free. The legal landscape widened title by title as older works entered the public domain.

That distinction is also why I would not summarize Dulabone’s career by saying, “Oz was public domain, so he could do anything.” That would be historically and legally sloppy—and it would actually undersell the more interesting part of what he accomplished.

He did more than write sequels. He built infrastructure.

One of the strongest passages in the Oz Club retrospective comes from a 1987 review noting that Buckethead appeared to be the first publishing house whose sole purpose was making new, book-length Oz pastiches available. That is a remarkable description when you read it through a modern creator-economy lens.

Dulabone was functioning as:

That last point is the one I think contemporary creators should study most carefully. You do not need to own the entire cultural universe to become known for the distinct creative value you consistently add within a lawful part of it.

Robert Evans enters the story

Two surviving books make the Robert Evans connection concrete.

Robert later told me that the two of them “basically wrote alternate chapters.” That detail is especially interesting because Dulabone appears to have used the same collaborative structure elsewhere. In the Oz Club retrospective, Marin Xiques—his frequent collaborator and longtime partner—described their process as each writer taking alternating chapters and discovering what the other had written.

Robert also told me that Chris especially liked Telly, a character Robert had created, and wanted to develop a sequel to Abducted to Oz. Robert believes they began something but never carried it far. That unfinished thread gives the history a poignancy, but it also reveals something practical: the collaboration was not simply contractual. They were responding to one another’s characters and seeing future possibilities in what the other person had made.

The question Dulabone asked in 1990 still matters

In the Autumn 1990 issue of The Baum Bugle, Dulabone wrote an article titled “Why Do People Keep Writing Oz Stories?” The Oz Club’s later retrospective says he identified familiar motives—resolving inconsistencies, tying up loose ends and extending unfinished threads—but also something deeper.

For Dulabone, Oz had influenced readers’ ideas about confidence, difference, equality and how people saw the world. His position was essentially that a fictional world with that kind of emotional impact did not feel complete merely because the original publication sequence had stopped.

I think that is the philosophical center of his career.

The smartest thing Dulabone did was add new value

If Dulabone had spent thirty years merely reproducing the most famous Oz beats, there would be much less to study. Instead, he repeatedly layered his own work onto the foundation: new stories, new characters, new locations, new jokes, new collaborators, new publishing structures and new continuity.

That creates a useful distinction for any creator working with public-domain source material:

The Chris Dulabone method

This is my interpretation of the pattern, not a formula Dulabone himself published. But it is visible across the record. He started from Oz, then spent decades adding enough original activity around it that Chris Dulabone became an identifiable Oz creator in his own right.

Public domain does not mean “everything you remember about Oz”

This is where the creator lesson becomes legally important.

The U.S. Copyright Office uses The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an example of how public-domain works can inspire new derivative works. The Office notes that Baum’s 1900 book entered the public domain in 1956 and later inspired works including The Wiz and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked.

See the U.S. Copyright Office public-domain example →

But the existence of a public-domain foundation does not erase the separately protected expression that later creators add.

The Eighth Circuit made that distinction especially clear in litigation involving The Wizard of Oz. The court explained that people may develop public-domain material in new ways, but that freedom ends where the new work copies protected increments of expression added by later copyrighted works. The opinion specifically discusses the distinctive look associated with the 1939 film, including Dorothy’s film costume and ruby slippers.

Read Warner Bros. Entertainment v. X One X Productions →

This is also why I am careful with Robert’s own recollection of copyright advice he received years ago. Robert remembers being told that derivative-work registration meant he could write Oz stories without permission even if underlying material were copyrighted. I am preserving that as Robert’s recollection, not publishing it as a general legal rule.

The better rule for creators is simpler:

Dulabone appears to have understood the boundary more than a casual reading suggests

One of the most revealing episodes in the Oz Club retrospective involves Atticus Gannaway submitting an Oz manuscript to Dulabone as an eleven-year-old. Dulabone responded with a long letter encouraging the young writer—but also pointing out that the manuscript had used characters that were still under copyright.

That is significant.

It shows that Dulabone’s practice was not simply “Oz is free, use whatever you want.” He was actively thinking about which characters and source material were available at a particular moment. The exact legal analysis of every book he published would require title-by-title review, but the historical record shows an awareness that copyright boundaries inside Oz changed depending on the source.

He was building a creator ecosystem before we used that language

Dulabone’s legacy becomes even more interesting when you look beyond his own bibliography. He encouraged children to write books. He published collaborators. He supported other independent Oz publishers. His work inspired later publishing efforts. He created places where other creators could participate rather than treating his own authorship as the only valuable activity.

That is an ecosystem.

Creators today have dramatically easier tools for publishing, design, distribution and collaboration. That makes Dulabone’s accomplishment more impressive, not less. He built much of this when self-publishing was expensive, layout was difficult and reaching a niche audience required direct effort.

What Robert’s collaboration teaches us about shared worldbuilding

Robert and Chris give us a smaller, more human example inside the larger publishing story.

Alternating chapters meant neither writer could fully control the path alone. One person had to accept what the other had just introduced. A character created by one writer could become the other writer’s favorite. A scene could create a new possibility that neither author had planned in advance.

For creators, that suggests four practical collaboration rules:

1. Separate the shared foundation from each creator’s new contribution.
2. Keep a record of who introduced important original characters, settings and story elements.
3. Let collaborators genuinely affect the world rather than assigning them decorative work.
4. Discuss ownership and future-use rights before success makes the ambiguity expensive.

That final point matters because Robert himself raised it in our correspondence. He knows that copyright questions become more serious when a book becomes commercially valuable. That instinct is correct even where his recollection of the exact legal doctrine may be broader than the law supports.

The unfinished sequel may be the most revealing detail

Robert told me Chris wanted badly to make a sequel to Abducted to Oz, and that they may even have started one. The project never developed very far.

There is something fitting about that. Dulabone spent his life treating Oz as unfinished—not because Baum failed to finish it, but because a living fictional world always leaves another door unopened.

Chris died in December 2020 at age 56. The Oz Club’s memorial describes a man whose friends remembered just how far his influence had reached only after messages began arriving from around the world.

His books remained. His collaborators remained. The writers he encouraged remained. The publishing model remained available for somebody else to study.

And now Robert is opening that door again

Robert Evans is still writing, still thinking about Oz and still talking to me about what another collaborative book could become. I do not want to force a sentimental “passing of the torch” story onto a relationship that deserves more honesty than that.

But there is a real continuity here.

Robert once built Oz stories by handing chapters back and forth with Chris Dulabone. Decades later, he is again discussing characters, story direction, rights boundaries and what a new version of Oz might become with another collaborator.

The lesson I take from Chris is that the goal should not be to reproduce what already worked.

What modern creators should take from Chris Dulabone

Continue through the Jack Righteous Oz and IP road

Educational analysis only, not individualized legal advice. Public-domain and trademark status can vary by work, jurisdiction, publication history and use. Verify the exact source material before a commercial release.