The Red Planet on the Four-Color Page: Mars in Comics
John Carter of Mars
The Red Planet on the Four-Color Page: Mars in Comics by Jerry Whitworth
Recently, NASA landed the Curiosity Rover on the surface of Mars providing a vast resource of information on the “red planet” that we never before had access toward. Man has told tales of the fourth planet from the sun for many years, a medium frequently employed in this way is the comic book. One of the earliest stories applied to the four-color page was from a source predating comic books by several decades. The Barsoom series written by Edgar Rice Burroughs describes Earthman John Carter as he is transported to Mars where he becomes that world’s champion and weds its princess. Created for pulp magazine (one of the chief progenitors to the comic book), Carter’s story would be applied to a comic strip for the Chicago Sun in 1941 but would be published for comic books in 1952 for Dell Comics, 1972 for DC Comics, 1977 (and again in 2012) for Marvel Comics, 1996 for Dark Horse, and 2010 for Dynamite Entertainment.
Read MoreJohn Carter of Mars: Genesis of an Origin Story
John Carter of Mars: Genesis of an Origin Story
by Jerry Whitworth
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The Golden Age of comics was a mixed bag of genres given life on the four color page: traditional hero archetypes as that of Greek and Sumerian mythology, pulp fiction and radio costumed adventurers, and living embodiments of the red, white, and blue. Superman found his origins in the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage, Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (1930), and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Batman was born from the Shadow, Zorro, Green Hornet, and Roland West’s the Bat (1926).
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