Number 1732: Prisoner of the Tharks

I was a teenage John Carter of Mars fan. The novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs are grandiose with their battles and intrigues, more like European history, now that I think of them. Burroughs’ imagination gave the stories the alien life forms. The science fiction touches, an atmosphere factory, the flyers (on a planet where they do not seem to have discovered motorized ground transportation), lent an appropriate air of the exotic. Also, in the old editions I read from the library there were pictures by Frank Schoonover and J. Allen St. John, like this cover by Schoonover from the first novel, A Princess of Mars.

I bought the Gold Key John Carter of Mars #1 in late 1963. It reprints an earlier Dell Four Color issue, #375, from 1952. It is drawn by Jesse Marsh, in a style much different than other artists who drew John Carter. Marsh was the regular Tarzan artist for Dell. His Tarzan looked much like the character depicted in other media, but his John Carter looked like someone out of a production of The Student Prince. It was the capes, especially. When I read it in 1963 I could accept updating  John Carter to modern times (I assume he is fighting in the Korean War, then current), but the costumes...egad.

I pulled it out of my collection recently and re-read it. I noticed what Marsh put in the panels. Many of them show abstract art on the walls, even sculpture. The costumes don’t bother me, now. Mars is a cold place (“in fact it’s cold as hell,” according to Bernie Taupin and Elton John), and in a practical sense the near-naked John Carter is sillier than the (presumably warmer) dandy-in-a-cape John Carter.

These scans are from my copy.

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