It's the last day of the holidays already- can you really count the weekend?- and the wind is chilly with a touch of autumn. Here is another in a series of posts on Mars in comics and pop culture.
I first read one of Burroughs' Martian novels in 1978, I think: Swords of Mars, which I borrowed from Strathaven Library in the Ballgreen Hall. It closed recently, as I discovered last month, and library services moved up Commercial Road to the new St Patrick's Primary.
I had read the short-lived DC version of John Carter, Warlord of Mars in the early 70s but I didn't see any of the Marvel issues until the spring of 1979. I then read two subsequent issues, published sporadically in that year and finally one much earlier comic, in a Marvel Grab Bag bought in Lewis's department Store in Glasgow in 1980, I believe.
However, this year I decided to embark on reading the entire series, reprinted in b/w by Dark Horse. I took five pages of notes this morning, coming to grips with this massive tome, which collects 28 issues and 3 annuals.
Marvel's interpretation was launched by Marv Wolfman, like the DC version. I am not a fan of Wolfman's writing at all. Nova is a hackneyed blend of Spider-Man and Green Lantern. The hugely successful New Teen Titans was sentimental, continuity-busting melodrama, rescued by Perez's obsessive detail- but the trade-off was an unfortunate amount of cheesecake and sadism. So, I had low expectations for Warlord of Mars.
The first ten issues are devoted the epic "Air Pirates of Mars", in which a cabal named the Council of Five endangers the atmosphere factories of Barsoom. The first issue is drawn by Gil Kane and inked by Dave Cockrum. It's gorgeous and it covers Carter's metaphysical transportation to Mars. However, something of Kane's dynamism is lost under the lush inks of the Filipino artist Rudy Nebres, in the rest of the serial.
Carter uncovers the plot by the cyborg Stara Kan but is branded a traitor. He encounters a shipwrecked alien parasite, comically named T'rallaa ( "Tra-la!") and escapes from an "incredibly deadly" giant spider.
Wolfman introduces a comedy relief character, Grogg, who has the same irritating speech pattern as the later Mammoth and Citadellians: " The bigger the battle, the better Grogg like it". It's patronising and tiresome.
The rest of the dialogue is repetitive, histrionic and given strange emphasis, as if English were Wolfman's second language. "It wasn't easy...I wanted Kan and I wanted him dead... I will kill you! I wll kill you, Kan, I swear it!...I will see you destroyed... I still want to strangle the life from your stinking, slimy bones!"
Grab Bag Booty
Although Carter overcomes Kan, there are tragedies en route. The lover of young warrior Kantos Kan is turned to stone by living stone-snakes -which remind me of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds Are Go -and thoats stampede through the nursery of Helium.
Finally, Carter, having destroyed the council's floating city, confronts the mutated Great One who wants to recreate Barsoom This preposterous creature is an antediluvian product of the Tree of Life, who commits suicide but not before typically awful Wolfman speechifying:
"Feel the dust and decay you fight to promulgate...answer me, man of another world! Answer me!" Happily for the reader, the mohawked Great One revels "at the thought of once again feeling (the) loving embrace" OF DEATH.
Issue eleven features a beautiful Cockrum splash page and retells A Princess of Mars. Quality plummets again for three issues, however, as Carmine Infantino illustrates what is essentially a zombie apocalypse. The mummified wizard Zhuvan D'ark leads an army of eye-blasting skeletons and swaps bodies with Carter. This is quite like REH's Conan tale Black Colossus and is totally out of place in the Martian milieu, as was a similar DC instalment, years earlier.
I like Infantino's Batman and Flash very much but he was unsuited to the "Weird Mystery" and Sword and Sorcery Marvel gave him in the late 70s.
Wolfman's final monthly script "The History Holocaust" tentatively explores Carter's mysterious immortality. The scientist Tallus traps Carter in simulations with Atilla the Hun and Alexander the Great in a warlike tale by Walt Simonson, whose own style is obscured here. There's also a handsome back-up strip by Ross Andru, retelling the bizarre Tree of Life myth from The Gods of Mars. Andru's Carter and Dejah Thoris make quite a sexy couple.
Chris Claremont then takes over as writer with a stupendous 12-chapter saga, "The Master Assassin of Mars". The artists here include Ernie Colon, Frank Miller ( in an early Marvel job) and Mike Vosburg. It seems to me to comprise two discrete plot lines, which take a very long tome to connect.
Carter is poisoned by Dejah's double, the assassin Daria, Dejah sets out on a quest for revenge and a revived Carter ( preserved by his Terran biochemistry) has to rescue her form the harem of the winged men, who inhabit the Great Rift Valley. This is a real geological feature- a titanic crack in the planet's crust.
Eventually slaying the decadent king of Karanthor after five issues of very dull captivity, when they are condemned to the arena, (of course) Carter and Dejah have to climb eight miles to the summit of the vast canyon system and survive an attack by White Apes. In a typical reversal of fortune, they are then captured by the Guild of Assassins in their flying dreadnaught.
A coup d'état in Helium now occupies the thrust of the plot. Carter enters into telepathic rapport with Dejah, like Colleen and Danny in Iron Fist and he discovers she is pregnant. This is where I came in.
Tars Tarkas helps the couple escape the assassins but Dejah is captured by an assassin spy in Helium and is fed to the Martian rats.
Carter destroys the dreadnaught in "the hour before dawn, the time the Danes call the Hour of the Wolf" ( a true Claremont trope!). Kantos Kan rescues Dejah but even though the literal (Thark) cavalry turns up, Dejah's mother Tara is killed by the chief assassin Tal Mordin.
In the conclusion, Carter has a showdown on an ice floe with Mordin, who is dragged under by mysterious, inhuman hands. Carter then runs a Martian marathon to rescue Dejah from the green Warhoon. In the epilogue she lays an egg and they vow to call their child Tara- although I think it turns out to be a son, Carthoris, if I have the time-line right.
I enjoyed Claremont's story better although it felt ridiculously long at points. The adventures in Karanthor seemed interminable. I did like Dejah's fighting skills and determination as she turned the impersonation back on the assassins guild. However, the female assassins Daria and Lleila didn't make up for the repetitive hostage situations Dejah found herself in - nor her implied rape. In the penultimate chapter, there's a Flash Gordon-serial moment where Carter plunges on to the roof of a Heliumitic building, only to be found lying in the desert in the following issue.
On the plus side, the "fierce, elemental passion" of the couple was portrayed with less hysteria and proclamation than Wolfman and his jarring sword-and-sorcery trappings were forgotten. Claremont depicts the royal family of Helium fighting together against the assassins and the flashback to Carter's failed ascent of Everest is intriguing and convincing. Nonetheless, the Vosburg or Cockrum versions of the Warlord of Mars have never quite unseated the Murphy Anderson depiction in my mind.
Next time, I'll look at Marvel's three Barsoomian annuals from the late 70s.
Coming soon: Moorcock on Mars
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