Edgar Rice Burroughs was a professional daydreamer.
It was a career for which constrained circumstances had, luckily, carefully prepared him.
“Born in 1875, Burroughs had failed at a dozen jobs and enterprises — clerk, railroad cop, gold miner, soldier, salesman, etc. — before he turned to writing at the age of 35,” noted Lee Server in Danger Is My Business. “His first novel, Under the Moons of Mars (later published in book form as A Princess of Mars), was the story of John Carter, a Virginia gentleman mysteriously teleported to the Red Planet — known to the local residents as ‘Barsoom.’ Soon, Carter is tangling with the 15-foot, four-armed Tharks, the green men of Mars, sword-wielding creatures riding huge, eight-legged beasts.”
The reduced gravity of an arid planet only slightly more than half the size of Earth naturally gave Carter breathtaking abilities, and anticipated Siegel and Schuster’s Superman.
Burroughs had “…what has been termed by Robert Sampson a ‘precognitive reverie,’ a decidedly intense form of daydreaming in which Burroughs’ unconscious shaped his ideas into near-finished form before releasing them to his conscious mind,” Server observed.
“Somehow Burroughs, who surely was not alone in his own or later days in having to face the practical demands of daily existence, was able to articulate a heroic vision compounded as much from his own sense of personal inadequacy as from his keen sense of the classical myths on which he drew so strongly in shaping this fiction,” wrote Holtsmark.
For the next four decades, ERB continued to pen his mythic page-turners (remember, the mysteriously immortal John Carter begins his adventures by effectively dying and being reborn).
“No doubt the critics are right when they call the heroic stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘escape literature,’ but perhaps for such a world as we have made for ourselves, escape is the message most vitally needed,” wrote Tom Slate in the Riverside Quarterly.
Despite the fact that he was a major influence on superhero comics, John Carter has had a curiously lackluster career in the medium itself.
“Early in the 1930s, Burroughs had begun trying to interest newspaper syndicates in a strip about the heroic swordsman of Barsoom, and in 1933 he’d had J. Allen St. John, illustrator of many of the Tarzan and Mars novels, draw up a batch of samples,” noted comics historian Ron Goulart. “Nobody was interested.”
A John Carter of Mars feature ran in Dell Comics’ The Funnies from 1939 to 1941, when it was replaced by Captain Midnight.
“(In) 1952, two years after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ death, Dell tried a comic book, again adapting the novels, with Jesse Marsh, longtime Tarzan comic book artist, doing the drawing. The book lasted for three issues, all of which were reprinted (by Gold Key) in 1964.
“In 1972, DC tried Carter in Weird Worlds, with Murphy Anderson the initial artist. The hero held on for seven issues. Marvel took a turn in 1977 with John Carter, Warlord of Mars, on which Gil Kane led off as artist. The book lasted, in various formats, for a little over two years.”
Comics aside, ERB’s daydreams about daring supermen in exotic locales would prove popular worldwide, making his Mars novels enduringly and reliably bankable.
And ERB’s second protagonist would be even more successful.
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