A
couple of quickies to get me a little further along the way toward
catching up with where I'm actually reading....
Warriors
of Mars #1 of 5 (?) (2012)
I'm
presuming this is a miniseries, and guessing at the number of issues
based on the length of Fall of Barsoom
as well as each of the first two story arcs in Dejah
Thoris.
Warriors of Mars
is a bit of an odd duck (or malagor)
– a crossover between Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and a book
which likely gave him a bit of inspiration in creating it, Lieutenant
Gullivar Jones: His Vacation,
written by Edwin Lester Arnold and first appearing in 1905, a
half-dozen or so years before ERB would have been conceiving A
Princess of Mars. It's
available under its more well-known title, Gulliver of
Mars, at Project Gutenberg. I've downloaded it to my iPad; I tried to read it in
preparation for this series, but I can easily see why what the
Wikipedia article here
calls “its lukewarm reception caused [Arnold] to stop writing
fiction.” It's pretty wretched and I didn't make it very far, so
what little I know of the plot comes from that article as well as,
even more so, a review of a recent scholarly edition at SF Site,
here.
Basically,
US Navy Lt. Gullivar Jones travels to Mars via magic carpet, where he
has a series of misadventures that mainly seems to have afforded the
Englishman Arnold a chance to comment both on H. G. Wells' The
Time Machine and the image of
the “ugly American.” Like Wells' time traveller in the far
future meeting the Eloi and the Morloks, Jones meets two opposing
races, the Hither and Thither Folk, but the characterization of the
races is quite different than Wells'. And like the stereotypical
“ugly American,” Jones is bumblingly arrogant and condescending.
How
well this can be blended into ERB's Barsoom I'll likely have to let
other reviewers address, but my guess is that Dynamite's Gullivar
Jones (at least they retain the correct spelling of his name) is
going to find a Mars quite different from the one Arnold sent him off
to on “vacation.”
Quickly: This story is framed by Dejah Thoris telling John
Carter a secret regarding her mother – here named Heru, daughter of
Jeddak Hath of the old city of Seth (I think the similarity to DC's
Hawkman villain “Hath-Set” is purely coincidence). Before she
met Dejah Thoris' father Mors Kajak, Heru had loved another, a man of
Jasoom, Lt. Gullivar Jones, USN. As told by Dejah Thoris, the
circumstances whereby Jones came by the carpet and was whisked off to
Mars follow Arnold pretty closely – I did get that far but not much
further, not far enough to know how well the next bit tracks. Jones
ends up rescuing Princess Heru from a plot by the Thither People –
who look kind of like bigger, meaner, and very red Tharks – but
during a feast in Seth to honor him a second plot succeeds in seizes
her while he is left unconscious, face down in a canal....
Warlord
of Mars Annual #1 (2012)
Tars
Tarkas tells John Carter the tale of the events that brought the
Tharks to that incubator where they first met. It's a fairly well
done story, maybe most interesting to me for Tars Tarkas' commentary
on John Carter's warlike nature:
“Sometimes
I do not understand you, Prince of Helium. … You are nothing less
than this planet's savior. You have changed our culture with
kindness and friendship. … And yet if I were to count the men who
have died by your sword, I might not finish the task in a lifetime.”
“A
Thark lifetime?” John Carter asks.
“Certainly
not your lifetime. …
As you have sometimes made references to the possibility that you are
immortal, I have found myself wondering something else from time to
time. … Perhaps you are your planet's god of war.”
The
brothers in arms laugh heartily over tankards of wine, but it's an
interesting notion....
Compared
to the standard-length Warriors of Mars
#1, this extra-priced ($4.99 as opposed to $3.99) “annual” gets
just five extra pages of story (26 as opposed to 21) – and that's
including a glossary text page. It does feel heftier because it contains a substantial preview of the Warlord of Mars: Fall
of Barsoom trade paperback
collection, basically the latter half of the first issue of that
miniseries. I just have to keep telling myself this is not one of
the big publishers, but one of the smaller “Independents,” and
that the quality of what is presented is pretty decent.
Cheers!
– and Thanks for reading!
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