Early Pulps: Part 2 John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian—a veteran of the American Civil War—transported to Mars and the initial protagonist of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom stories. His character is enduring, having appeared in various media since his 1912 debut in a magazine serial.

John Carter was the lead character in the first novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, set on a fictionalized version of Mars known as Barsoom.

Written between July and September 28, 1911, the novel was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in the pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912. It later appeared as a complete novel only after the success of Burroughs’ Tarzan series. For its October 1917 hardcover publication by A.C. McClurg & Company, the novel was retitled A Princess of Mars.

The character paved the way for other characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and made popular adventures on Mars, which would influence writers like Heinlein and Bradbury.

Carter reappeared in subsequent volumes of the series, most prominently in the second (The Gods of Mars, 1918), the third (The Warlord of Mars, 1919), the eighth (Swords of Mars, 1936), the tenth (Llana of Gathol, 1948), and the eleventh and final installment (John Carter of Mars, published posthumously in 1964). John Carter is also a major secondary character in the fourth volume (Thuvia, Maid of Mars, 1920), and the ninth (Synthetic Men of Mars, 1940). In Spring 2020, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. released John Carter Of Mars: Gods of The Forgotten, the 12th book in the Barsoom series and is officially seen as canon.

Appearance

Carter stood 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) and had close-cropped black hair and steel-grey eyes. Burroughs described him as immortal. In the opening pages of A Princess of Mars, it is revealed that Carter could remember no childhood, having always been a man of about thirty years old. Many generations have known him as “Uncle Jack,” but he always lived to see them grow old and die, while he remained young.

His character and courtesy exemplify the ideals of the antebellum South. A Virginian, he served as a captain in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, Carter and his companion Powell, who was also a captain in the Civil War, became gold prospectors. Carter and Powell struck it rich by finding gold in Arizona. While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he appeared to die; leaving his inanimate body behind, he was mysteriously transported by a form of astral projection to the planet Mars, where he found himself re-embodied in a form identical to his earthly one. Accustomed to the greater gravity of Earth, he found himself to be much stronger and more agile than the natives of Mars.

Background

On Mars, which its natives call Barsoom, Carter encountered both formidable alien creatures resembling the beasts of ancient myth, and various humanoids. He found his true calling in life as a warlord who strove to save the planet’s inhabitants. He won the hand of a Martian princess, Dejah Thoris of Helium, but after several years of marriage he sacrificed himself to save Barsoom from the loss of its atmosphere. Awakening again after this second death, he found he has been miraculously transported back to Earth, into his original body. Carter then collected the wealth that resulted from his discovery of a rich vein of gold ore right before his original passage to Barsoom. Unable to return to Mars, he spent several more years in a small cottage on the Hudson River in New York, where he once more appeared to die on March 4, 1886.


Again, Carter’s apparent demise was not a true death; rather, he was restored to Barsoom, where after more adventures he rose to the position of Warlord of Mars, having played an instrumental role in creating alliances among many of the sentient races of Barsoom. He returned to Earth on a number of occasions afterward to relate his adventures to his nephew (“Burroughs”), revealing that he has mastered the process of astral travel between the two worlds. During his adventures on Mars his earthly body reposed in a special tomb that could only be opened from the inside.

John Carter and Dejah Thoris became the parents of a son, Carthoris, and daughter, Tara. Carthoris played a secondary role in The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars, and is the protagonist of Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Tara was the heroine of The Chessmen of Mars (1922), and the mother of Carter’s granddaughter Llana, heroine of Llana of Gathol.

In Comics

John Carter has appeared many times in short-lived comic strips and comic books, as well as in various Big Little Books of the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1932, Burroughs tried to convince United Feature Syndicate, the distributors of the Tarzan comic strip, to also make an adaptation of John Carter; however the syndicate rejected the idea. In 1933, King Features Syndicate, wanting a science fiction strip to compete with the popular Buck Rogers, which began in 1929, discussed a John Carter adaptation with Burroughs. Burroughs and the illustrator J. Allen St. John, expressed an interest in doing such a strip for King Features. However, Burroughs and King Features were unable to reach an agreement, and the syndicate decided to use an original strip — Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond — instead.

In 1941, United Feature agreed to the creation of a John Carter strip, hoping it would become as successful as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The most notable John Carter comic adaptation to appear in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ lifetime, John Carter of Mars was written and illustrated by Burroughs’ son John Coleman Burroughs. This strip debuted on Sunday, December 7, 1941— the very day of the infamous Pearl Harbor Attack. This strip lasted only 4 months, ending on April 18, 1943. Coleman Burroughs’ strip was reprinted in book form by House of Greystoke in 1970.

Dell Comics released three issues of John Carter of Mars under its Four Color Comics anthology title. The issue numbers are 375, 437, and 488 and were released in 1952-1953. These were reprinted by Gold Key Comics (with different covers) in 1964.

Carter has appeared in various subsequent graphic adaptations of the Martian stories, notably the “John Carter of Mars” feature that ran in DC Comics’ Tarzan and Weird Worlds comics from 1972 to 1973, and in Marvel Comics’ John Carter, Warlord of Mars from 1977 to 1979.

Impact

John Carter of Mars was a major influence on other science fiction/fantasy tales and characters through the 20th century, including Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Superman, Adam Strange, Dune, Warp!, Den, and Star Wars to name just a few. The movie Avatar was inspired by John Carter of Mars. According to Avatar’s creator, James Cameron, “With Avatar, I thought, ‘Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars – a soldier goes to Mars.’”

In the first chapters of Gore Vidal’s novel Washington, D.C. (1967), the character Peter Sanford – aged 16 at the outset of the plot – indulged in vivid and detailed fantasies of being John Carter, and added explicit erotic scenes not appearing in the original Burroughs books.

In The Number Of The Beast, by Robert Heinlein, two of the main characters were inspired by the John Carter series. One was actually a reserve captain from Virginia named Zebadiah John Carter and his (soon to be) bride was named Deejah (Deety) Thoris Burroughs. They used technology to skip to various worlds, and ended up meeting Lazarus Long.