Many writers, such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, began creating pieces of literature that were appropriate to be dubbed science fiction long before the First World War and the coining of the phrase. With his story Under the Moons of Mars, published in 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs joined the ranks, depicting a Confederate cavalryman fighting against the Union of the Northern States.
John Carter entered a mysterious cave and inhaled a chemical that rendered his physical body immobilized, but his astral projection landed him on Mars. He was living in another body on Mars, though, and appeared to be stronger and more nimble because he was used to Earth’s higher gravitational pull.
John Carter took part in a number of adventures in which he sided with Martians against other Martians. He eventually married a Martian Princess named Dejah Thoris and became Prince, only to be forced to return to Earth and return to Mars at a later date. His romance with Dejah Thoris spawned a sub-genre of fiction known as Interplanetary Romance.
The romance between Marvel’s Star-Lord and Gamora, Thanos’ daughter, is a classic illustration of this. Despite being a well-known pop culture phenomenon in North America and having a narrative and setting that may be adapted into a film, Edgar Burroughs’ work has long been underappreciated.
In this video, we will go over every detail of this iconic hero, who influenced a number of popular DC and Marvel heroes as well as set the foundation for interplanetary conflict and cultural exchange. Let us get this party started, shall we?
John Carter First Debuted In A Magazine Serial
John Carter was a fighter for the Confederacy of the States of America during the civil war. He first appeared in 1912 as the protagonist of author Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom stories. If you’re wondering what exactly Barsoom was, well, it is just a fictional representation of Mars.
Although more than a century old, the character of John Carter has been an enduring one so much so that in 2012 Walt Disney Pictures and Andrew Stanton collaborated to release a live-action film to celebrate John Carter’s 100th anniversary. SO, John Carter was the protagonist of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first story, Under the Moon of Mars.
After it was written between the July and September of 1911, the story got published in the pulp magazine called The All-Story in July 1912, for which Edgar earned around $400, which is more than $10000 in today’s value. Edgar Rice was also the creator of Tarzan, known back then as Tarzan of the Apes.
After the massive success of Tarzan stories and series, Edgar Rice published John Carter as a complete novel. When the hard-cover version of Carter’s novel was released, they retitled it as A Princess of Mars.
Carter then became a popular figure and appeared in several issues. In the third issue of The Gods of Mars, which was published in 1918, Carter is thrown back to Earth forcefully, but he returns to meet with his wife, Dejah Thoris, after a separation of ten years. He then appeared in The Warlord of Mars, which was published in 1919. He continued to appear in other novels as late as 1964 when Johnn Carter of Mars was published, long after Edgar Rice Burroughs had passed away.
Apart from being the primary protagonist in several novels, John Carter also served as a secondary character of some repute in works such as the 1940 novel Synthetic Men of Mars. In the September of 2021, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. published the twelfth book titled John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten; interestingly enough, this will be perceived as the official canon for John Carter stories.
John Carter Origin
John Carter’s origin is largely unknown, and even he doesn’t precisely know when and where he was born. He once said about his past, “I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more, but I cannot tell because I have never aged as do other men, nor do I remember my childhood. So far as I can recollect, I have always been a man, a man of about thirty.
I appear today as I did forty years ago or more.” So, from this, we learn that he is not an ordinary man. Although he can not recollect from where and when he came, one fact that’s established is that he may be an eternally living man or at least older than most people alive, so is he a vampire of sorts? I mean, what other way do we know for someone to have lived like that?
Nevertheless, he has always been a warrior since the beginning of time, that is, or at least for as far as his memory serves him. And his fighting and battle skills were put to good use and tested once he reached Mars. In fact, before joining the Confederacy of the States of America, he had served several different sides in battles across five different continents.
After fighting for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, he lost touch with his family, including his nephew, who was interestingly named Edgar Rice Burroughs. Later, he would find a huge deposit of gold with his colleague and friend Captain James K. Powell.
However, Native Americans ambushed them, they killed Powell and Carter had to take refuge in a cave with toxic gases, which rendered him immobile, despite his undaunted efforts to move away from the cave.
Now, despite the fact that there are several story arcs, his origin story largely remains the same throughout. Also, because he was a literary character transformed into a comic book hero, the comics and the related literature written by Edgar Rice Burroughs also bear several similarities.
Once inside the cave, he was initially rendered immobile, but after much effort to rise up, his astral body mysteriously separated from him and walked out of the cave, only to find a red star glowing brightly in the sky. Its calling inexplicably transported him to Mars. After his arrival, he realizes that he has developed superhuman strength and agility because of the reduced gravity and pressure on Mars.
But he soon got captured by the green Martians called Tharks, who were led by Tars Tarkas. He defeated several great white apes, which were a threat to the Tharks, and the Tharks were impressed by his enhanced abilities. Fortunately for John Carter, he not only gained their trust but also developed telepathic abilities. And eventually, he learned their language and taught the native Tharks about respecting their animals. It was now that John Carter made friends with a dog-like Martian creature named Woola that looked beastly and had ten legs but was rather docile and friendly.
Carter soon found himself in the midst of a battle between two Martian cities. He saved Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium, and earned the title of Dotar Sojat, which was basically the names of the two Thark chieftains that he had defeated and killed in combat. So, John Carter proved his military might and skills even in an alien world, defeated them with relative ease, and earned their respect and admiration.
After a while, John Carter escaped from the place with Dejah Thoris and a Tharkian named Sola, who was initially employed to look over John Carter. In due course of time, Dejah Thoris would get captured and be forced to marry a prince named Prince Sab Than, but John Carter joined hands with the Tharkian ruler Tars Tarkas to rescue Dejah from the clutches of Sab Than.
They managed to do that just before the wedding could take place, after which they went to Dejah’s homeland called Helium, where Carter and Dejah Thoris got married, and naturally, John Carter became a prince. Sometime later, John Carter died on Mars but woke up on Earth in the same Arizonian cave from where his astral self was transported to Mars.
Due to his exploits of the Civil War, he had become fairly rich and spent ten years on Earth living in a large house that overlooked the Hudson River. When the time finally came for him to return to Mars, he instructed his nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs to bury him in a specially curated and well-ventilated tomb that could be opened from inside.
John Carter Live-Action Adaptation
John Carter (2012)
Before we go into the explanation of the film, you should know that the film and the source material differ in a few instances, largely because of cinematic purposes, but overall the major plot points remain similar.
In the year 1881, John Carter summons his nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs. Once Edgar reached Carter’s mansion, he found that Carter had suddenly passed away and had himself entombed in a mausoleum of sorts that only opened from the inside. Edgar was, of course, surprised by the situation he had found himself in. furthermore, John Carter had left all of his property and belongings in Edgar’s name; why he did so, Edgar didn’t know.
John Carter’s attorney handed Edgar a private journal that John Carter wanted only Edgar to read. The rest of the film proceeds in flashback as Edgar reads the diary. So the real story begins in the year 1868, thirteen years before the present.
Colonel Powell of the United States catches John Carter and asks him to join the Union against the Apaches, but having lost his wife and young child to the Civil War, John Carter didn’t wish to participate in any more fighting. When Carter escapes Powell’s custody, and the latter chases him, they are confronted with the Apache tribesmen, who shoot at them, injuring Powell.
John Carter rescues him and reaches the Spider Cave of Gold that the Apache Tribesmen feared. Inside the cave, a There appears, presumably from Mars. Now you must know that Therns are basically an ancient race of Martians who control, feed off, and often provoke wars between kingdoms and people of a planet. There had appeared to be using a medallion that could facilitate interplanetary movement.
Although John Carter killed the Then, he activated the medallion and got transported to Mars, or at least his astral self, as his body still remained in the Spider Cave of Gold. On Mars, he gets captured by the green and four-armed Tharks and their Jeddak or leader called Tars Tarkas.
John Carter had found himself on Mars at a time when Helium and Zodanga, the two greatest cities of Mars, were at war. The Jeddak of Zodanga named Sab Than had been provided a weapon of mass destruction by the leader of the Therns, Matai Shang. With the help of this weapon, Sab Than was approaching the gates of Helium and planned to marry Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium.
However, Dejah escaped this forced marriage on a ship and came to the kingdom of Tharks, where John Carter saves her from Sab Than and his Zodangan army. Due to an internal conflict, Tars Tarkas sends his daughter Sola, John Carter, and Dejah away.
John Carter had been looking for a way to get back to Earth, but apart from learning about the working mechanism of the medallion, he and Dejah learn about the ninth ray, a source of infinite energy. Something like the Tesseract from the Marvel universe. But they soon get attacked by Matai Shang and his minions, only to be saved by Helium ships.
But everything comes at a price, and the price of being saved was that Dejah had to marry Sab Than. Dejah agreed to marry Sab Than primarily because she knew that John Carter would wish to go home, and without him, defeating Sab Than was impossible. So, the only way to save her Heliumite people from Sab Than’s wrath was through a matrimonial alliance.
Later, Dejah offers John Carter a chance to go home by telling him the chant that he must recite holding the medallion, but John Carter chooses to stay and help her overthrow the Zodangas and the Therns.
But even one mighty man can not stop an entire army, can he? So he goes with Sola to seek Tars Tarkas’s army. However, Tars had been overthrown by a usurper, who threw John Carter and Tars in a fighting pit with two Great White Apes. John not only killed the apes but the usurper as well, and hence became the new Jeddak of the Tharks.
With the Tharks by his side, John Carter defeated the Zodangan army, but in the ensuing chaos, Matai Shang managed to escape. After the victory, Carter married Dejah and became the Prince of Helium. On the first night of his marriage, he resolves to stay on Mars and throws away the medallion, but unbeknownst to him, Shang got hold of the medallion, and he sent John Carter back to Earth, where he found himself once again in the Spider Cave of Gold.
From this point onwards, John Carter used the gold from the cave to launch massive digging operations across the length and breadth of Earth and found another medallion ten years later. As the flashback ended, Burroughs was instructed to protect his body from the Therns because if his physical body was destroyed, John Carter of Mars would get destroyed too. Burroughs runs back to the mausoleum and opens it using a code that John Carter had left him in the telegram. Upon opening the door, he found that Carter’s body was missing, and a Thern was about to kill Burrough, but John Carter shot the There from behind.
It was all an elaborate trap set by John Carter to kill the There and retrieve the Thern’s medallion to go back to Mars and to his beloved Dejah. He enters the mausoleum, chants the secret code, and gets back to Mars, or Barsoom, as the Martians call it.
Siegfried Kracauer once noted that art blooms in the most hostile of lands, or well, something like that. Directed by Andrew Stanton, the film uses some thrilling special effects. If you thought that the creatures you just saw were mind-blowing, wait for the city that walks on legs. Stanton remained true to the source material written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and only elevated the style with his imagination.
The film had a slightly complex plot, which is probably the reason why it bombed at the box office. Yet, it had some breathtaking sequences spread all over and wasn’t as bad as people think it is. Taylor Kitsch as John Carter and Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris have performed amazingly and shared an above-average level of on-screen chemistry.
Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas was another treat to the ears. Did you know that John Carter probably has the record for spending the most extended amount of time in the developmental hell? Well, the pre-production started back in 1931, when the Looney Tunes director Robert Clampett approached Edgar Rice Burroughs to convert his novel into an animated film, but the project couldn’t get completed back then. Seventy-nine years later, in 2010, the production for John Carter resumed. Somebody didn’t just travel through space but also through an ocean of time.
John Carter’s Influence
Well, John Carter has been referenced in several TV shows. For instance, the Japanese anime Zone of the Enders: Dolores, I, the show’s protagonist named James Links, was always addressed as John Carter by a Wired Officer named Baan Dorfloun. James was a human who fell in love with a Martian woman and had children with her. In the fifteenth episode of the show, a prince named Carter from the planet of Burroughs comes to Earth.
Furthermore, in the live-action space opera Babylon 5, John Carter is mentioned in an episode titled Spider in the Web. The pilot of a colony ship headed to Mars is named John Carter. Who remembers the animated Justice League series from their childhood? Well, in the pilot episode of the series titled Secret Origins, an astronaut is sent to Mars named J. Allen Carter.
This Carter was responsible for an invasion of Earth with the help of Mars-based Imperium, and it was Imperium that was responsible for the destruction of Martian Manhunter’s entire race. I hope you remember the Martian Manhunter from Snyder Cut of Justice League, where he made his latest live-action appearance.
Comic Books
Although John Carter appeared in several temporary comic books and comic strips and many issues of the Big Little Books during the 30s and the 40s, Edgar Rice Burroughs wanted him to have a dedicated comic book, like other contemporary superheroes. Therefore in 1932, Burroughs initiated talks with United Feature Syndicate, who were distributing Tarzan comic strips at the time, to adapt John Carter as well, but the talks failed.
A year later, Buck Rogers had become a hit, and King feature Syndicate wished to launch their own sci-fi superhero to compete with Buck Rogers, so they contacted Burroughs, but once again, Burroughs and the syndicate couldn’t come to terms that both could agree upon. Ultimately King Features Syndicate went with Flash Gordon, who turned out to be a bigger hit than Buck Rogers.
Finally, in 1941, United Feature expressed their wish to launch a sci-fi hero to compete with the likes of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, or rather they wanted to ride the commercial tide. Burroughs was contacted once again, and everything went smoothly.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ son John Coleman Burroughs wrote and illustrated the comics, but it wasn’t really a success and had to be canceled after only 16 months. Interestingly, the comics were first issued on December 7th, 1941, the unfortunate day when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Many years later, in 1970, House of Greystoke reprinted Coleman’s comics into a book. In 1952, Dell Comics released three issues that featured John Carter, and Gold Key Comics reprinted these issues in 1964. As is the norm with most heroes, DC and Marvel also published John Carter comics or at least had him included in the comics in major supporting roles.
A 1996 four-issue Dark Horse Comics named Tarzan/John Carter: Warlords of Mars merged the two characters, and the mini-series was widely praised. Apart from these, John Carter has been referenced in several mainstream and popular novels like Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, Philip José Farmer’s “World of Tiers,” Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory, etc.
And, by the way, according to the latest comics published by Dynamite in July of 2021, our hero will go into battle against his eternal love and Martian Princess Dejah Thoris in the aptly titled Dejah Thoris vs. John Carter of Mars #1. Do you wish to take sides and place your bets, or do you think that it is just a test that all good relationships go through?
Future of The John Carter Franchise
If we are to believe a UK-based website, Disney is in the process of making a John Carter live-action television series for Disney Plus. Although the website doesn’t give away any other information like an estimated release date or cast, we believe that this is a perfect way forward to go with John Carter.
The lore and backstory of John Carter are so huge that it is largely impossible to sum it up in a single movie or even two movies. The reason why the 2012 film John Carter flopped was probably that they tried to sum up the entire novel into a single movie, now that was bound to raise some eyebrows.
Furthermore, a video game set to release in May of 2022 will set the stage for John Carter and Ian Fleming to share the screen. Yes, the game John Carter: Warlord of Mars will feature the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming himself.
It’ll be interesting to know how exactly they manage to set these two legendary literary figures, one fictional and the other real, into the same continuity or universe, but we couldn’t be more intrigued. Speaking of Ian Fleming, do let us know in the comments what you thought about No Time to Die.