He thinks he's being reassuring!

So among the characters in L Frank Baum's John Dough and the Cherub (which eventually had some characters appear in Wonderful Wizard of Oz line books) is the King of the Fairy Beavers, who helps John Dough and Chick the Cherub and some others escape their pursuers. I thought I'd give a try at depicting an interesting character who, here, explains why there don't seem to be any other beavers, fairy or otherwise, in the Hall of the Beavers. The text doesn't actually give the King of the Fairy Beavers a cape, but the illustrations in the original book do, and it's a nice thing to have on. So https://archive.org/stream/johndoug.....e/252/mode/2up if you want to see what a real artist made of it. (Or you can poke around http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4716.....-h/47166-h.htm if you prefer.)

John Dough and the Cherub is a pretty amusing book and one that pushes a lot of buttons, if you're into that sort of thing. Among the features: inanimate life, as John Dough is made of gingerbread. A gender-ambiguous character, as Chick the Cherub is never identified as male or female or what and the book ends with the first explicit mention of this. A character gets disassembled and magically reassembled. John Dough gets some pieces of him eaten off, not always with his consent. A bear made of rubber. Plus it has a great scene where the Princess wonders whether a beaver can even be a fairy, and Pittypat the Rabbit acts like he has finally heard the proverbial Stupid Question. ``All the animals have their fairies, just as you human folks do.''

Content Warnings, though: there's a character referred to relentlessly as The Arab. Well, he is supposed to be Arabian, and the reference breaks up just using his name all the time, but it still feels uneasy to read. Also there's a line trying to tie his tribe to one of the races of nasty and non-human people that Jack Dough and Chick the Cherub face down, which is not at all good. But it is a character making a guess, rather than the narrator saying what's so, so maybe we can say it's character-racism? Still, I don't like having to rationalize stuff. (And we have the too-common fantasy trope of The Race Of People Who Are All Like That, although one of those races is ``pirate''.)

And, Chick is an Incubator Baby, a term from the early 20th century when premature babies were shown in their incubators as sideshow attractions. Also John Dough has a weird visceral hatred of a guy whose only crime, far as I can tell, is that he's a living assemblage of sporting goods and that's pretty snotty for a guy made of gingerbread.