'Kansas' is home to a flipped version of the 'Oz' story

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Just think of someone and their little dog, too, threw water on and melted you. Come on, you wouldn't be that excited about the situation either.

And the Wicked Witch isn't pleased at all, which is why she's heading out of Oz and going hunting for Dorothy in Kansas, a new digital comic-book series debuting from Arch Enemy Entertainment.

"We've kinda flipped the story: The idea is what if the Wicked Witch survived Dorothy's attack" from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, says Jason Stevens, a co-writer along with Arch Enemy founder William Wilson. "It's just a little different take on the whole Oz mythology than anybody's ever read before."

Every Thursday, USA TODAY will exclusively present new pages from the first issue of Kansas, which is also the comics debut of Australian artist Lesley Vamos.

"I watched the movie growing up and was reasonably obsessed, to put it mildly," she says. "The concept of being swept away into another world — away from the mundane and into something Technicolor — was a very intoxicating concept for a kid with a big imagination."

The story begins in Oz but doesn't stay there very long — it is called Kansas, after all.

When it turns out the Wicked Witch isn't just dust in the wind, she journeys to Earth wanting to kill Dorothy and wreak as much as havoc as she can. However, time works differently in Oz than the real world so she shows in modern-day Kansas and a Gale farm occupied not by Dorothy but by her great-granddaughter Dorothea.

The girl — who goes by "D" because she hates her first name so much — has to rescue her loved ones from this otherworldly invasion of an irked witch, her castle and an army of flying monkeys, and bands together with two of her best friends and a deputy (which represent the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion "in a really cool way," Stevens says) to beat back her new enemy.

While D doesn't know the family saga involving tornadoes and Yellow Brick Roads, her uncle knows the score and there's a Munchkin who also arrives from Oz to get D up to speed.

"There are a lot of secrets left to explore both for the audience and her — we know what's going on but she doesn't," Stevens says, "and one of the more interesting parts of the story is her discovering her own hidden family history and how she can grow because of that and what it means to her to live up to someone she's never met."

For D's design, Vamos kept Dorothy's dark features for family commonalities' sake, and the young girl is stunning but unaware of how beautiful she is, which is why the artist put her in practically styled, comfortable farm clothes.

"I also gave her a slightly scrawny body as though she hasn't quite hit womanhood yet," Vamos explains. "The freckles and dark skin were a nod to her time spent in the fields. Her eyebrows I kept thick to reinforce the fact she doesn't care. Finally, to give her that classic sense of beauty I made sure her eyes and lips were large and her nose quite small.

"I hope I'm not the only one that thinks she's pretty."

One character who's not — at least on the inside — is the Witch herself, who shows scars of her earlier encounter.

"I wanted her to be a sort of 'harsh beauty,' someone who could have been stunning but her sourness/dark magic and the melting incident have given her a more gaunt/scary and severe look," Vamos says. "I also wanted to style her after classic evildoers to bring a sort of tradition to it even though the story is set in the future."

With round edges, soft colors and whimsical themes, Vamos' artwork is usually geared toward a younger audience. But the fact that car chases, school fights and sprawling landscapes aren't really her forte made her excited about Kansas.

"As an artist you tend to get pigeonholed a fair bit," she says. "This project was something I don't think anyone else would have given me the chance to do."

Kansas is also a chance for the writers to put their own twist on the concept of The Wizard of Oz, a work where "everybody's been influenced by it in some way, shape or form creatively," Wilson says.

The Wicked Witch is hunting down one of literature's most iconic character, he adds, "and she's not there. She's passed. Time has passed, and it's time for another set of people to pick up the mantle and go on this adventure we've all come to know but do it in a very modernized way."