If you missed the last one…
John Carter and the Robots of Mars. Every heard of it? Edgar Rice Burroughs never wrote it but someone close to him did. Not only robots, but other fantastic creatures as well…
John Coleman Burroughs (1913-1979) was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ second son. John grew up in California, became an artist and painted several of his father’s book covers. John also drew the John Carter of Mars Sunday comic in 1941. (His wife, Jane Ralston Burroughs did the modelling for Deja Thoris.) United Feature Syndicate distributed the comic, hoping it would become another Flash Gordon. (ERB and John’s idol, J. Allen St. John had tried to get a comic done back in 1933 but the newspaper syndicate went with Flash Gordon instead. Eight years later, they were willing to give it another try.) The first episode premiered on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese.
The Flash Gordon influence can be seen in the types of stories John did. John had inherited the fascinating world of Barsoom from his father, with its tall, green warriors, giant white apes and daring-do. But to compete against Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Barsoom would have to get even more interesting. John used the expected material from the books in the first seventeen weekends before adding in some new ideas of his own.
The first of these was the Durkoos, a giant bird. ERB created Malagors in 1940 for The Synthetic Men of Mars, but this bird is something of John’s creation. The mother bird tries to feed Deja Thoris to her babies. (A very ERB thing to do.) John has the bird monster fight a dragon that looks Chinese in design. The dragon and bird go off to fight it out to the death.
JCB’s next creation is the robots of Mars. Armed with swords, these metal men form a dangerous army for the lone swordsman. The robots are created by the Wizard of Eo, Vovo, strangely a thark (Mad scientists and wizards in Burroughs are almost always human.)
The pair go to the city of Go-La-Ra, and Deja is turned to a statue of stone. Deja gets restored to life but as a giant fifty-foot woman. (along with their pet calot.)
Escaping the robots, but still giant in size, Deja and John encounter chicken giants…
water monsters…
giant spiders…
and finally intelligent plants.
Deja gets reduced back to her own size before having one last Barsoomian adventure that features the controversial three-legged Barsoomian rat.
April 25, 1943, after seventy three episodes, the Sunday comic was discontinued. The only thing harsher than a Barsoomian prison, is the competitive world of newspaper comic strips. Fans did not materialize and JCB was done.
Now I see in places on the Internet people disparaging any digression from the original Burroughs novels. And I get this. When DC Comics began Tarzan Family, Robert Kanigher wrote “Amazon of Barsoom” with Thorjah, that entirely ignored the canon. I was disgusted. I mean where did that earth horse come from? And why have red two armed apes when ERB gave us four-armed ones? Kanigher phoned it in…
But John Coleman Burroughs is a different deal. He was charged with creating a Barsoom comic that could compete with Flash Gordon. If he had stayed faithful to the source material, he would have been canceled must earlier. Comic readers expected new monsters and ideas on a regular basis. They weren’t all ERB enthusiasts. Yes, these new creatures weren’t pulled into the novels (by 1943, ERB was a newspaper correspondent for the war, having witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor from Waikiki first hand.) He would only publish one more Barsoom book in his lifetime. Llana of Gathol was a collection of Pulp stories he wrote in 1941 so it is all material from before the comic strip.
Personally, I find JCB’s comic fascinating. If it had caught on, ERB might have handed Barsoom to his son in a much bigger way. Imagine if the strip was still going. (Flash Gordon is.) What new wonders might we have seen?
Next time…Kenton of Star Patrol!
