Interplanetary Craft

Today I wanted to talk about the pulp novels I re-read over the past couple of months, as I revisited the  Heroic Fantasy craze of my mid-teens.

Sometime in the early months of 1972, I got this comic off the spinner rack in Baird's musty pet and hardware store on Kirk Street in Strathaven, a few doors down from the lawyer's office where my mum worked and around the corner from the bank where my dad was manager. The owner was a lugubrious man who looked like Jimmy Jewell and his miniature Dachshunds would squeal and scurry around as I knelt to hunt for new copies of Superboy and The Legion of Super-Heroes or The Demon.

I knew the names of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books from a copy of this Sixties Gold Key comic:

its prehistoric monsters and tailed men were a world away from the adventures of the lithe but paternal Ron Ely on tv or the Connery-esque macho of Mike Henry in the movies. The Plant-Man monster and swordsman on the cover Of Weird Worlds would have caught my eye as I'd read three Conan stories by that point. But this was somehow even more illicit and thrilling. Anderson's heroines, Dejah Thoris and Thuvia wore costumes that were astonishingly revealing by Bronze Age standards; his Martian life-forms were so well-designed they could believably be part of an alien ecology; and the Mahars of Pellucidar, the telepathic reptile rulers of the Inner World were so repulsive and the slaughter so savage that this was Comic Book Crack for pre-teens.

 Never seen the phrase "action-jammed" before or since.

I picked up two further issues: the first on holiday-probably passing through Castle Douglas- and the second in Baird's, before the title was turned over to Howard Chaykin's lush and exotic space opera, Ironwolf. The ERB issues were as bloodthirsty and lusty as before but Anderson's classy pencils had been replaced by the dreamy, European look of Sal Amendola.

  I'd read an early-70s Thorpe and Porter reprint of the first issue of Korak in Coia's Cafe in Strathaven but it would be many years before I'd actually get to read an episode of  Carson of Venus: it would be a tantalising hint of DC Bronze Age back-ups for a further couple of decades-just like Zatanna. Rose and the Thorn or Spawn of Frankenstein.

 Also, I wouldn't realise for many years that although Adam Strange's adventures bore some resemblance to Carter's, it was Anderson's Hawkman, from my early childhood, who most resembled the interplanetary swordsman, with his armoury of weapons and his monstrous foes.

In the late 70s, Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane revived John Carter at Marvel for a couple of years but I didn't see a single issue until Chris Claremont was scripting the book in its dying days. I enjoyed the final chapters of "The Master Assassin of Mars"; Claremont's pro-feminist stance established Dejah Thoris as protagonist of the story, although she looked more like Buck Rogers' gal pal Wilma.
And by the late 70s, I had pretty much devoured all the Sphere Conan books and was looking to move on to other fantasy fare. The subterranean, long-gone Grant's bookshop in Union Street had become a semi-regular haunt on our occasional Saturday visits to the city:

 Boots' Corner, Glasgow, October 1977

1950s, I think

Right now, I can picture a shelf on the far, right-hand wall of the shop and this lurid, orange image of  the Sivana-like scientist rearing up with phallic syringe above the naked maiden.

But the first Barsoom book I read was Swords of Mars from Strathaven Library in '78. I'd quickly exhausted their Conan stock and the psychedelic Mayflower editions of Moorcock; Swords was the only ERB book they had.

 Apart ftom the PCs, Strathaven Library hasn't changed

 In August of 1979, we had a family holiday on Arran. It rained torrentially for most of the week-when doesn't it?- but I remember reading this racy-looking number on the ferry, perched on our luggage. By this time, I had begun to borrow from East Kilbride's Olympia Centre library.

Carson Napier is an adventurer who has travelled to the cloud-shrouded forest world of Amtor (Venus) by rocket. Lost on Venus, the second novel in this series, sees him attempt to rescue two princesses from a megalomaniac who has a method for reanimating the dead. Unfortunately, it's a lot less exciting than it sounds. There's also a subplot about a city run on principles of eugenics and racial purity. Carson is worryingly keen on this fascistic utopia so I found it hard to root for him. Thirty-odd years on, the Venus stories are still too pedestrian for me.

By late August of 79, I was enrolled at Hamilton Grammar School for Highers, while my friends went to Larkhall. There's the kind of bus that wound the backroads from Chapelton to the town. Around the corner from Lightbody's the Baker (with the red sign)  was McGregor's toyshop where I got a Yellow Submarine and later, Marvel's Kull the Conqueror in "The Scorpion God!". The concrete block in the background is Baird's department store which was taken over later by M&S.
I used to spend those thirty minute-journeys to and from school wreathed in adults' cigarette smoke and gratefully immersed in books; for the next six months or so, some of them were from the Mars series. I can still remember my eyelids drooping over the dusty, antiquated prose with teenage tiredness. Ironically, earlier in the year, I had devoured Lin Carter's simplistic Burroughs pastiche, Jandar of Callisto.
This summer,up here in Moray, I decided to reread the first four Barsoom books- A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars and Thuvia, Maid of Mars. "Princess" kept me occupied on a two-and-a-half hour bus journey to Aberdeen. This time around, I found it much easier to visualise the ancient cities and encampments of the dying world. John Carter is presented as an enigmatic, mystical figure: already seemingly immortal, he is transported to Mars effectively by wishing for it. Unfortunately, the other Martians are ciphers; crucially so in the case of the incomparable Dejah, as beautiful and distant and unknowable as another planet. It's very hard to care for the characters when they are drawn so simply.
"Gods" was where I first met Carter, in comic form, and, in addition to introducing the horrific Plant Men, it traces Carter's overthrow of the cannibalistic religious leaders of Barsoom. Both books end on the kind of cliff-hanger we would come to associate with the Saturday morning serials of the Thirties and Forties. Warlord of Mars reveals the fate of Dejah Thoris and Thuvia but despite giant wasps and a polar city, it's a less engaging quest story than Gods. However, the end of the jealous and dangerous Phaidor provides an exciting climax.
Thuvia is really the story of Carter's son, Carthoris.The apple has not fallen far from the tree and the book centres on his quest to rescue the princess Thuvia from a lost city whose inhabitants can materialise their thoughts. Despite surviving years of imprisonment by cannibal priests and her unexplained ability to control Martian lions, Thuvia is a passive figure, far removed from the "Huntress of Hell" depicted in Weird Worlds. That's the crux of my problem: Wolfman and Anderson spoiled me with their cynical and bloodthirsty heroes.

At the Earth's Core turned out to be the most enjoyable and compelling ERB novel I've read so far. I always think of the 1975 Amicus movie as the third Peter Cushing  Doctor Who film. With a still-boyish but portly Doug McClure as the hero and the lavish charms of Caroline Munro, it's a papier-mache family-friendly romp and I'm very fond of it; but,again, it was a far cry from the grisly world of the Learned Ones of Pellucidar as depicted by the Crusty Bunkers. The book is a pacy, breathless read full of cockeyed ideas about Time (and, like the Martian books, several contemporary ideas about race that are jarring to modern sensibilities.)

I might be inclined to revisit the adventures of Ulysses Paxton/Vad Varo in Master Mind of Mars, maybe around Christmas- we'll see; the plots are extremely repetitive - but in re-reading Burroughs, the use of adjectives like "Cimmerian" and "Stygian" had me wondering that surely Robert E. Howard must have been aware of ERB's stories.
Of course, the original Conan is esentially historical fiction with a supernatural element whereas Burroughs is Romance with sci-fi trappings. But it's Comic Book Conan that I find superior. Last week I read When Giants Walk The Earth, another Dark Horse reprint collection of Marvel's Conan. This is the second phase of the Belit Saga and this volume contained four stories I never read in 1977-78, thanks to sporadic distribution in the Central Belt.

What I find impressive, in middle-age, about Roy Thomas's tenure is the scope of the story. One segment is a prequel to an incident (with a giant toad!) in the Carter/ DeCamp pastiche novel Conan The Buccaneer. Although, ostensibly, this collection is about pirate queen Belit's attempt to rescue her father from imprisonment in Stygia/Egypt, these stories are also about the arc of the slave girl Neftha, whose name recalls Nefertiti. That's important because in the next volume she'll become ruler of Stygia and like the pharoah Hatshepsut, she does it in male drag. Points for Egyptian scholar Thomas and further points because Neftha-as King Ctesphon- will give Thoth-Amon "great honour...casting down" the other magicians of Stygia thereby setting up events in the King Conan series!
Unfortunately, the collection falls down with a three-part adaptation of an REH original (non-Conan) story, "The Lost Valley of Iskander".  Although it's a violent tale and Ernie Chua embellishes Chaykin's art - back to Weird Worlds again! Weird, indeed!- until it blends seamlesly with Buscema, the premise is very silly. In timey-wimey style, Alexander the Great and his soldiers found a dynasty in the Hyborian Age.Because this book is, as I said earlier, essentially Historical Romance, the time travel aspect has little impact and makes less sense. A rare mis-step for Thomas.
That story marked the last Bronze Age Conan comic I would buy; I would keep up with the British reprint of Savage Sword of Conan for a while and even ordered the short-lived Valour in 1980. For some reason, however, after four years, I stopped following the colour Conan book. But although I'm considering buying a reprint collection of the Marvel John Carter comic, I doubt that it will be anywhere as involving as or display the quality of Roy Thomas's Conan.

Coming Up: Rory's Choice; The Green Hornet; and Supergods
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