O Green Man: The Visual History of the Thark - Part 1

I was scoping out things at a garage sale, with every intent of reselling them on eBay, when I came upon a treasure. (This was how I spent my sunny Saturday mornings back in the early 2000s. If I found a book about Betty Page for a quarter I smiled (to myself), knowing it would go for forty bucks in auction.) But there was this time…. when I came across a thark. A toy from the 1990s, sold alongside a Tarzan and John Carter figure. My first thought was PROFIT! But I never sold that thark. I still have him. Why? Was it because he didn’t have his sword, wasn’t in the packaging? No. I just wanted to keep him. (If you push the purple button on his necklace he makes a silly screeching sound. Screech-screech!)

The image of a thark speaks to my deepest, youngest self. I can recall being about twelve and finding copies of old Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks at my library. The ugly Gino D’Achille covers intrigued me with their weirdness, especially the one for The Mastermind of Mars with its four-armed giant white ape. Later I got a copy of The Princess of Mars featuring a thark and the most cramped text of all the Burroughs paperbacks. Ballantine did not do my eyes any favors.

So some of that was floating around in my head when I saw that toy. Here was that iconic figure, discarded along with the Ninja Turtles, Street Sharks and G. I. Joes. The thark deserved better. So I took him home and I kept him (hoping to find his sword one day but I never did.) And I still look at him every-so-often and remember that twelve-year-old fascination. Here is adventure, wonder and excitement. Critics always ask “Why is such a bad writer as Edgar Rice Burroughs still read avidly a hundred years later?” I know the answer. This toy tells me the answer.

Well, this got me thinking about tharks. What was the very first image of a thark? Which were the best? What is my favorite? Edgar Rice Burroughs describes the very first appearance of the Green Men of Mars thusly:

Five or six had already hatched and the grotesque caricatures which sat blinking in the sunlight were enough to cause me to doubt my sanity. They seemed mostly head, with little scrawny bodies, long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs. Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head. The ears, which were slightly above the eyes and closer together, were small, cup-shaped antennae, protruding not more than an inch on these young specimens. Their noses were but longitudinal slits in the center of their faces, midway between their mouths and ears. There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color. In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female. Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young. The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located. The whiteness of the teeth is not that of ivory, but of the snowiest and most gleaming of china. Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance.

Here we see the true magic of ERB. A bad writer? In some respects, perhaps, but not in visualizing his creations, not at making you see and believe them. This description supplied an army of illustrators with plenty of details to use. The very first of these was an unknown artist who did the header for the original appearance in The All-Story (February 1912) with the Norman Bean by-line. Here we can see the six-limbed insectoid figure with suction-cup ears. The cover for The Warlord of Mars (December 1913) would copy this figure for the background but the first installment of Thuvia, Maid of Mars (April 8, 1916) features a scary-looking thark chasing Thuvia. P. J. Monahan’s version of a thark feels arachnoid somehow with large eyes and a spidery skeletal structure.

The first book editions of the Barsoom novels were published by the A. C. McClurg company and featured covers and illos by Frank Schoonover (September 1917). Schoonover (a member of the Brandywine School of Art alongside N. C. Wyeth) did not feature too many of ERB’s weird creatures. He preferred the human figures and architecture. He did do one illo with a Green Man standing with his back to us, hidden behind a chariot. There is a ghostly second thark in the background. This is the first version to suggest the distinctive Martian clothing of belts worn across the chest. (See top)

Schoonover’s replacement in 1919 was an artist who would be the first to become associated strongly with all things Burroughs and his weird creations. This was J. Allen St. John who began with The Warlord of Mars in September 1919. The cover featured no tharks but the interior art did. Unlike Schoonover, St. John loved the weird creatures and landscape of Burroughs and featured them regularly. St. John would illustrate four Mars books and many of the Tarzan and Pellucidar novels. He would also continue to produce covers for the Pulps that featued ERB stories. He was Burroughs’ favorite illustrator. St. John was so strongly associated with ERB that Pulp editors would hire him specifically for their Burroughs knock-offs, to strengthen the idea that here was new Burroughsian style adventure. St. John’s tharks are interesting because he always clothes them in what is now classic Barsoomian attire, belts with gems and helmets with wings or crests. It was here that the final version of what a thark looks like cemented, though other artists would try other interpretations.

Burroughs was always an excellent businessman at getting his product out to consumers. This included newspaper serials of his novels. In 1921 A Princess of Mars was serialized in papers like The Range Ledge, Hugo Colorado. The illustrations for the novel were done by Irwin Myers. His version of the tharks gives us a chubby creature that at times seem comical. It is unlikely these images had much influence on later artists.

St. Allen’s replacement on covers was one very dear to Ed Burroughs, his own son, John Coleman Burroughs, who began doing covers in 1937. He only did two Barsoom covers and only the 1948 Llana of Gathol features a thark.

John Coleman Burroughs would have plenty of practice before this because he drew the first of the Barsoom comics. Tarzan had been a smash as a comic strip since 1928 but John Carter was never going to match the apeman but JCB tried. Dell Comics had a reprint anthology comic called The Funnies that featured strips from newspapers. After a while they found it easier to draw their own but kept the Sunday Page look. One of these strips was “John Carter of Mars” with issue #30 (May 1939) to #57 (July 1941), the first four episodes drawn by Jim Gray before JCB took over. John Coleman’s wife Jane Ralston Burroughs helped with inking and modeling for the strip. All seventy-three installments are available here. Colour Sunday pages. This comic strip is important because it is the first and set standards for those published in the next decades. John Coleman Burroughs’ version of the Green Men is not much different from St. John’s (who he admired) though his head gear suggests a Native American look that strengthens the argument that the tharks are just green Indians to play against John Carter’s cowboy.

The comic strip’s art was also used in one of two Big Little Books, confusingly both are titled John Carter of Mars and both published in 1940. The first book was a new story that Burroughs would later adapt into adult fiction for Amazing Stories as “The Giant of Mars” (causing a small tempest of controversy around its authorship because of internal inconsistencies), while the second is an adaptation of the first novel with illos taken from Dell’s The Funnies comics. JCB’s new work looked cheap beside his comic strip art and does little to add to the mystique of the thark.

A version of the thark that might have happened if the Korean War had not, was Russ Manning’s John Carter of Mars. Manning, who would become one of the most popular of the Tarzan artists, played with the idea but abandoned it when he was shipped off to Japan. His design is quite different in that his thark’s have very piggy tusk, looking almost like mustaches. If Manning had succeeded, the look of the thark would have certainly changed. (See below)

Dell would create the next John Carter comics in 1952-53 with Four Color #375 (February 1952), #437 (November 1952) and #488 (1953). Gold Key would reprint them in 1963-64. These comics all had covers and interior art by Jesse Marsh. Marsh’s tharks look like frog-headed men and their physique does not feature prominently in the artwork but is hidden behind clothing. 1958 saw a true newspaper version of John Carter called “The Martian” in the British newspaper The Sun. The strip ran every Sunday in black & white from October 25, 1958 to May 23, 1959. It was written by D. R. Morton and drawn by Robert Forest. Forest’s tharks are wonderfully thin with googly eyes and tusks, but they lack the extra set of arms, perhaps thought too confusing for the small panels of the strip? Read the entire run here.