In our first installment we looked at the birth of the thark and the magazine, book hardcover images as well as the first comics. Our story continues with the rise of the paperbacks.
Paperbacks were big business by the 1960s and two companies had divided the spoils of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ legacy, Ballantine and Ace Books. Ballantine Books reprinted several Mars books in 1963 featuring the artwork of Bob Abbott. None of these featured a thark. Abbott, despite doing all the Tarzan covers, is not remembered as fondly as many of the paperback artists. (I know when I was a kid collecting books that I would always pick a Frazetta or Krenkell cover over an Abbott. This was because Abbott’s work was often only human figures sometimes printed with a sketchy, purple feel.)
Ace Books had Roy G. Krenkell doing their ERB covers with one thark-related cover for Thuvia, Maid of Mars, duplicating the scene featured on the original magazine cover back in 1916. Krenkell’s thark is clearly in the St. John tradition, wearing helmet and straps. Krenkell would become associated with ERB and dinosaurs as the title of his collection, Swordsmen and Saurians: From the Mesozoic to Barsoom (1989, Eclipse Books) clearly shows. He was also the mentor of perhaps the most important fantasy artist of the 20th Century, Frank Frazetta.
Reed Crandall is an artist who needs mentioning here. During the 1960s he drew a lot of Burroughs related art but did not usually sell it to paperback companies or comic book publishers. He did do illos for Richard A. Lupoff’s Canaveral Press that published the last of the unpublished ERB manuscripts. Reed displayed much of his work in fanzines such as Erbdom or Erbania, allowing him much less restraints around nudity. Though he did do comics for EC and Warren, he never drew a John Carter comic. Crandall’s tharks are more human-looking than many of his predecessors. Their clothing has a very real Roman feel to it. Despite this, his line work is amazing and adds plenty of atmosphere to his Barsoom.
From 1968-1971 John Carter got the comic strip treatment in the Czech magazine ABC with Dobrodružství Johna Cartera. The unknown artist’s rendition of the tharks is unlike anything seen in America or England. The tharks are squat and cartoony. It is doubtful this design had any influence on later artists. See the complete run. (See below)
Frank Frazetta is perhaps more associated with Robert E. Howard and Sword & Sorcery but he also did quite a few covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs too. From 1970 to 1974 he illustrated Doubleday’s hard cover editions, doing both covers and interiors. These are some of Frazetta’s best works. Frazetta’s tharks have a few non-St. John details. First off, Frazetta makes the thark head rounder. Secondly the entire body feels massively thewed (as only Frank can paint!) and not the stick-thin aliens of some earlier artists. Frazetta does not do many illustrations of tharks, preferring the other weird animals and characters.
Spurred by the success of Ballantine and Ace’s paperbacks, DC Comics thought to cash in on the Burroughs boom in 1972-1973, producing the stunning Joe Kubert’s Tarzan. As back-up to Kubert’s work, strips on other Burroughs characters were done, including John Carter. These appeared in a confusing array of titles: Tarzan, Weird Wolds and Tarzan Family. Written by Marv Wolfman, the DC John Carter suffered from a lack of consistency in the art department. First using top-notchers Murphy Anderson and Gray Morrow, the strip was finished by Dick Giordano’s assistant, Sal Amendola.
The first installment appeared in the first issue of DC Tarzan #207 (April 1972) and was drawn by Murphy Anderson. The second episode in #208 (May 1972) was drawn by Gray Morrow. #209 (June 1972) was Anderson again and then John Carter did not appear again until Weird Worlds #1 (August-Septembr 1972) which continued on with Chapter 4 after a recap. Anderson’s tharks are basically St. John tharks except for the fact that Anderson draws two chest, essentially one on top of the other rather than have the second set of arms sprouting out of the sides. Gray Morrow’s tharks look more like John Coleman Burroughs’ with Native American style head gear. Morrow also draws a female thark, giving her obvious female anatomy while still maintaining the tusks and other features.
Anderson did two more installments before Joe Orlando stepped in and inked the fourth, leaving his assistant Sal Amendola to finish the run at Issue #7. Amendola’s tharks go back to Murphy Anderson’s two chest look but the artwork when inked by Amendola has a wispy, almost Howard Chaykin look to it that has none of the solid reality of Anderson or Morrow. Unlike Mike Kaluta’s celebrated Carson of Venus or Dan Green’s passable Pellucidar adaptations, only Barsoom suffers so much inconsistency and unappealing work. I doubt anyone was sad to see it replaced by Chaykin’s “Iron Wolf” for the remainder of issues.
When Weird Worlds and Korak, Son of Tarzan were combined as Tarzan Family, Robert Kanigher and Noly Zamora tried to reboot the Barsoom franchise, by basically ignoring all the source material. John Carter (sans the wife) encounters beautiful Barsoomian Amazons, dinosaurs and lizard men. For the last two issues the old Murphy Anderson pages were reprinted. Zamora’s version of a thark has a cone-shaped head that is unusual. His tusks are also different, with one set facing up and another down.
One artist who rose from the fanzines to the comics was Neal Macdonald, who did a series on the creatures of ERB that were used as filler pages between comics. His artwork was used to illustrate John Roy Flint’s A Guide to Barsoom (Del Rey 1976) (which also featued a Boris Vallejo cover with tharks). Macdonald’s tharks harken back to St. John, while Boris’s look like bald monkeys and aren’t even green.
Finally we get to Gino D’Achille who painted the Barsoom covers for Ballantine in October 1973. Gino is a complete professional, doing covers for Westerns to Murder Mysteries, but his Burroughs related covers are probably his most famous. His thark, seen below, has probably the largest tusks of any artist up to this point. The eyes are human and not googly but the head does have the suction cup ears. The second set of arms seems to connect on the side but when I look at it carefully I’m not sure how. He wisely tries to block one side with John Carter’s head. Still, for all its faults the cover is striking. It certainly got my attention when I was twelve.
By 1977 Frank Frazetta was too busy doing film work to continue the Doubleday series. This task fell to comic book artist Richard Corben who did the cover and illos for Llana of Gathol and John Carter of Mars. Corben’s tharks are thoroughly Corben-esque, being stout and muscular. He creates fairly detailed costumes for his Green Men. He is also one of the few artists to put three or more weapons in the tharks’ hands.
DC dropped the Burroughs’ contract (largely because their foreign division didn’t like the Kubert work on Tarzan) and Marvel Comics had their chance to grab it between 1977 and 1979. While their John Buscema-style Tarzan could not shake the Conan curse, their John Carter comics fared pretty well at first. Marv Wolfman returned as the writer for fifteen issues before handing the job over to X-Men superstar, Chris Claremont. Wolfman had the added bonus of having Gil Kane as artist for the first ten issues. His work was inked by Dave Cockrum then Ruby Nebres.
Claremont’s thirteen issues were done by diverse hands including Ernie Colon, Frank Miller, Mike Vosburg and Ricardo Villamonte. There were three annuals featuring Sal Buscema, Ernie Chan, Alan Weiss and Tony DeZuniga, but somehow it was never the same after Nebres left. The design of the tharks was set by Gil Kane and never varied much after that. Kane’s tharks are well done, with plenty of detail on their accoutrements. He tried to vary the details so different characters could be identified.
Paperback publishers are always re-issuing successful titles, and Barsoom was no exception. Ballantine/Del Rey chose superstar painter Michael Whelan in May 1979 to re-do the entire series and of course, Michael had to feaure some tharks. His tharks are thin and wiry and we begin to see the first interpretation that would lead to Michael Kutsche’s design of the Green Men for the Disney film.
1995 saw Trendmasters Inc. the toymakers most famous for their Godzilla line, produce a Tarzan series for the 1995 television show, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures. For some reason they also included John Carter and his pal, Tars Tarkus. This is of course where I got my toy thark. Looking at the toy in the package I see I’m missing more than just the sword. Also the cape and arm bands. (Sigh.)
Dark Horse Comics reprinted the Marvel run then went on to produce a Tarzan/John Carter crossover four-part mini-series in 1996. Written by Bruce Jones and drawn by Bret Blevins, Warlords of Mars is in the tradition of Russ Manning. The great Tarzan artist produced several stories where Tarzan visited other Burroughsian haunts, such as Pal-U-Don and Caspak. Having started a John Carter strip in 1950, Manning might have eventually done a Tarzan-John Carter comic. Bret Blevins’ tharks are very tall and lanky like Michael Whelan’s painting, having the double chest. Much of the artwork in this comic was marred by bad production, making images murky and too solid black. The covers are the best example of Blevins’ work.
2009 saw a new book release for the series from Library of Wonder with Tom Yeates selected to do the artwork. Working in the tradition of the old illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll, Yeates turns in a great series of pictures with tharks, using both soft inks and Frazetta-like line work. His design for the tharks reminds me of Reed Crandall.
2009 also saw the first movie adaptation of A Princess of Mars, produced by The Asylum production company, starring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Traci Lords. This quick-to-market movie does not have CGI tharks but actors in costume. The design is about as good as you can get for an actor dressed in armor with a mask. No second set of arms and the feathered headdress has become a spike-covered head. The make-up was created by Tom Devlin.
Dynamite Comics began Barsoom comics in 2010. What made this possible was the lapsing of certain copyrights, seeing for the first time in comic history, two companies making Barsoom comics at the same time. (The other was Marvel. More on that later.) Dynamite produced several series including Warlord of Mars (October 2010-July 2014), Warlord of Mars: Fall of Barsoom (2011), Warlord of Mars: Dejah Thoris (March 2011-March 2014), Warlord of Mars Annual (2012), Dejah Thoris and the Green Men of Mars (February-November 2013), Dejah of Mars (May-September 2014) and John Carter: Warlord of Mars (November 2014-2016). These issues featured cover artists such as Alex Ross, Joe Jusko, Lucio Parillo and Stephen Sadowski. Though many different artists have painted and drawn for Dynamite their tharks tend to look the same: muscular and large but not dissimilar to Marvel’s design by Gil Kane.
The Asylum’s tharks were quickly forgotten with the advent of Disney’s 2012 film. Though financially lukewarm, the Disney movie is a wonderful spectacle that doesn’t insult the intelligence and was worthy of sequels that will not be made (?). The CGI tharks are skillfully done, with a wiry, thin body that still sells power and strength. They are fascinating to watch, stealing the show from the human actors.
February 2011-12 Marvel (and Disney, it’s new owner) had control of John Carter comics in anticipation of the new film. They produced three mini-series: John Carter of Mars: A Princess of Mars (November 2011-February 2012) written by Roger Langridge and art by Filipe Andrade, covers by Skottie Young; The World of Mars (December 2011-March 2012) written by Peter David and drawn by Luke Ross, covers by Mico Suayan; The Gods of Mars (May-August 2012) written by Sam Humphries and art by Ramon Perez, covers by Julian Totino Tedesco. In terms of thark design, all three followed the films thin-figures created by Michael Kutsche, though with differing degrees of realism.
With the meteoric splash and fall of the Disney film, it remains to be seen what is in store for future adaptations of Barsoom. My hopes that every kid would have a toy thark, from new action figures to stuffies was not realized. Dynamite is still producing a few comics with the help of ERB Inc. Roy Thomas has unveiled a new Digital Comic drawn by Pegaso. Samples of tharks are limited but the new look has some variations with a broader head and red eyes. We will soldier on. The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs have not waned in popularity since they were written and some day tharks and white apes, thandars and mahars will all be part and parcel of the greater collective culture. Till then…I’ll keep my thark toy. Screech-screech!
