A Princess, A Banth and An Illusory Army

cover art by P.J. Monohan

In 1916, Edgar Rice Burroughs had completed the first three Mars books starring John Carter, the finest swordsman on two planets. These three novels make up a trilogy, starting the Carter's mysterious teleportation to Mars and ending with him being chosen to be Warlord of Mars, married to Dejah Thoris and with a son named Carthoris.

As he did in late 1915 with the Tarzan series, ERB choose to now expand his selection of protagonists in his Mars stories. But where Son of Tarzan was the only entry in that series which didn't feature Tarzan as the primary protagonist, we would get four straight Mars novels in which someone other than John Carter would be at the forefront of the action.

It's probably a function of Tarzan's popularity that the Ape Man was never pushed to the sidelines of his books for very long. Or perhaps its because Tarzan usually had only a continent to play in, whereas Carter and his allies had an entire planet, giving ERB a lot more room for additional protagonists.

Wait. What am I talking about? I'm implying that Burroughs wrote fiction rather than simply passed on stories from Mars he heard from his uncle, John Carter. So if adventures happened to other people on Mars, ERB was merely being faithful to his duties as an historian in passing their stories on to us.

cover art by Gino D'Achille

Anyway, Thuvia, Maid of Mars was serialized in three successive issues of All-Story Weekly in April 1916. We'd met Thuvia in the previous novels. She was a Martian princess with the strange ability to calm down wild Banths and get them to obey her. Banths, by the way, are very large, 8-legged lions that are among the most savage and perpetually hungry of Barsoom's fauna.

John Carter's son Carthoris is in love with Thuvia. But, though she might return this love, she is engaged to the ruler of another city, part of a political match arranged by her dad.

So Carthoris is out in the cold. So is Astok, prince of the city of Dusar, who also loves the princess. But while Carthoris is willing to do the noble thing and step aside, Astok decides to kidnap Thuvia and frame Carthoris for the crime.

This involves taking Thuvia to one of Barsoom's many abandoned cities and also luring Carthoris to the same location--all part of the plot to make him look guilty of the crime while Astok can then run away with Thuvia. This, in turn, will set off a major war, with Carthoris' home city of Helium being forced into a fight against three other powerful nations.

art by J. Allen St. John

But Astok's plans go awry when Thuvia is kidnapped by a tribe of green Martians. Carthoris pursues the green warrior who carried her off and soon gets into some fights, which in turn results in Thuvia and Carthoris discovering the lost city of Lothar.

This is where things get delightfully weird. Lothar is a huge city, but only has about 1000 inhabitants, all male. This is the last remnant of a once mighty civilization that existed before Barsoom's oceans dry up. The Lotharians have powerful mental abilities. When attacked by the green Martians, they are able to summon up the image of a huge army. The illusion is so convincing that the green Martians simply fall over dead when shot with non-existent arrows, killed by the power of suggestion.

art by J. Allen St. John

Burroughs has fun with this section of the novel. He keeps up his usual fast pace and gives us plenty of action, there's also some wonderfully funny dialogue as one of the Lotharians tries to explain the ongoing philosophical differences among different factions in Lothar. Are they real and everything else an illusion? Are they illusions themselves? Is anything real? Does anything need to be real?

It's a biting parody of the sort of philosophical and academic discussions that grow obtuse and convoluted without ever actually explaining anything.  And, on top of that, Burroughs manages to sneak in a scene in which Carthoris and Thuvia are showed an illusion of what the once-mighty city was like in its heyday, giving us a scene full of forlorn melancholy amidst the mix of adventure and satire.

By the time Carthoris and Thuvia have gotten away from Lothar, they've been joined by Kar Komack, one of the illusory bowmen who has somehow become real. And when Thuvia is re-kidnapped by Astok, Komack's ability to also call up illusory bowmen might just come in handy when Carthoris mounts yet another rescue attempt.

A make-believe soldier who becomes real and then summons up additional make-believe soldiers. Even on Barsoom, that makes for an unusual day.

art by Roy Krenkel

I haven't re-read Thuvia in years and, in fact, may not have read it since first discovering the series in high school. I thoroughly enjoyed at last revisiting it. My thanks to Edgar Rice Burroughs for his commitment as Barsoom's historian.

The Deathless Honker

Turok Son of Stone is almost inarguably the most fun and purely geeky comic book ever published. A wonderful dinosaur-filled concept PLUS admirable and likeable protagonists PLUS great art work EQUALS a consistently entertaining and emotionally resonating book.

One of the most impressive things about the series was how varied the plots of individual issues could be given the arguably limited premise and setting. The writers (usually the prolific Paul S. Newman) always seemed to have another fresh plot idea with nearly every issue.

That being said, it's not surprising that a few ideas were repeated over the books 125 issue run. For instance, Turok #72 (January 1971) is the third time Turok and Andar are stalked by a particularly hard-to-kill meat-eater.

But even then, there are variations in the theme. I've written about the first two times the two friends had a particularly hard time against a specific dinosaur HERE. In one case, it was a carnosaur who was immune to their poison arrows. In another, they were out of poison arrows, but also needed to make sure they destroyed the carnosaur's eggs so that its offspring wouldn't overrun the valley.

In the issue we're looking at today, arrows are simply bouncing off a big black-skinned allosaurus. After hearing about the beast from some cavemen, they decide to investigate. They're not looking for trouble, but if they happen to meet up with the Deathless Honker, they want to be able to deal with it effectively.

By the way, there's no definitive credit for the writer, though I think it has a Paul S. Newman vibe to it. The typically excellent art is by Alberto Giolitti.

Turok and Andar soon find a pool of thick oily liquid that coats the skin and becomes inpenatrable. They test their arrows against an oil-coated log and a stegasaurus that wandered through the pool, confirming that this is what makes the big allosaur invulnerable.

So when they do run into the beast, its no surprise (but no-less frightening) when they confirm that their arrows don't work at all. What follows is an exciting extended chase scene, with the two friends desperately staying out of the allosaur's reach. At one point, they start and avalance and bury it. But their conviction that they are now out of danger doesn't last long:

They finally get a lucky break when they discover that water from a hot spring will wash off the black liquid. Turok, as he usually does in dangerous situations, improvises a plan using the resourses at hand. A water skin full of hot water is used to expose part of the allosaur's skin, then Turok uses himself as bait to give Andar a shot at that small target:

So, yes, this issue does repeat a plot idea that had been used a few times in past issues. But in each case, there was a unique variation on the theme and, in each case, we were given an exciting story with great art work and an awesome protagonist.

Next week, Batman goes to the Olympics---the Crime Olympics, that is!

Cover Cavalcade

From 1952: A perfect example of a cover illustration that MAKES you want to find out what's going on.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Our Miss Brooks: "School Band" 4/30/50

Mr. Conklin wants the school band to play when the Mayor's car drives by the school. He puts Miss Brooks in charge of getting the instruments cleaned before that happens.

What could possibly go wrong?

Click HERE to listen or download.

Fixing a Broken Plot Element

The episode "Miri," from the first season of classic Star Trek (aired October 27, 1966) isn't a great episode, but I think it's a pretty good one. It involves an Earth-like planet on which experiments in increasing life expectancies went rather horribly awry. All the adults have died from a disease that makes them insanely violent. The kids all now live for centuries, but they do age slowly. And when they do hit puberty, they succumb to the disease as well.

The Enterprise landing party gets infected, which means they are in a race against time to find a cure. The local kids, in the meantime, don't trust them (understandable because adults in their experience all become insanely violent) and work against them. Most notably, they steal the communicators, which means Dr. McCoy can't use the ship's computers to test a possible cure.

The title character (nicely played by Kim Darby) is the only kid in the episode who isn't perpetually annoying. She does help the Enterprise crew at first, because she has a crush on Kirk. But she later gets jealous of Janice Rand and also turns against them for a time, though she'll have a change of heart after being targetted by a Kirk Speech.

There's a reasonable level of suspense and some nice interaction between the crew--most notably an all-too-rare scene involving Kirk and Rand that reveals how much she cares for him (something she can't normally discuss because of their difference in rank). McCoy also gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome near the end.

Also, Kirk gets beaten up by children. Kirk is, of course, the best of the Star Trek captains by far (AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANYONE SAY ANYTHING DIFFERENT!), but for some bizarre reason, its fun to watch him get knocked down a peg by a gang of snotty brats.

But I want to talk about a rather weird plot hole. For budgetary reasons, the planet had to be extremely Earth-like and, in fact, the set of Andy Griffith's Mayberry was used when the episode was filmed. So how does the script (written by Adrian Spies and re-written extensively by Stephen W. Carabatsos) explain this?

The answer is: It doesn't bother to explain it. When the Enterprise first approaches the planet, everyone is surprised that it's size and atmosphere are absolutely identical to Earth, but then this is NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN! It is a bizarre--well, not really a plot hole, since the main plot of the story makes sense--but a plot element that goes annoyingly unexplained.

BUT WAIT! An explanation does exist. James Blish's short story adaptation (published in the first of twelve Star Trek anthologies) gives us a reason for how Mayberry ended up on another planet.

At first, I thought that this was something Blish got from the original shooting script that was left out in a rewrite or post-production edit. But according to the Star Trek wiki, the script never bothered to explain alien-Mayberry at all. So Blish came up with a reasonable explanation from whole cloth.

It turns out that the planet is actually a colony settled by people from Earth. They fled Earth several centuries earlier during a time of global strife. Star Trek's often inconsistent references to Earth history hadn't yet been developed at all this early in the series, but in retrospect it's easy to assume this was during the Third World War or the slightly later Eugenics Wars.

So they had cut off all contact with Earth, only sending a distress signal when their longevity experiments went awry and the grown-ups started dying.

It's such a simple and logical explanation. Even granting that TV scripts were often rushed through rewrites and production because of tight scheduling, it's amazing that the talented writers who produced this particular script didn't come up with something similar. The "It's identical to Earth, but not let's never mention that again" route the script took just gets on my nerves.

It should be mentioned that a later episode--"Bread and Circuses," which features a 20th-Century Roman Empire--cites "Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development" to explain that humanoid races can develop along similar and sometimes near-identical sociological lines. So this can be retroactively applied to "Miri" as well as a few other episodes. An article at the Star Trek site Memory Alpha gives more details on this.  Also, the episode "The Paradise Syndrome" mentions an ancient alien race known as the Preservers who apparently seeded species in danger of extinction on many different planets, which is why there's so many humanoid aliens in the Star Trek Universe.

There's also an Expanded Universe novel which explains that Earth-identical planets such as the one in "Miri" have arrived in our universe from parallel realities. A Shatner-verse novel apparently decides that the planet was a recreation of Earth made by the Preservers.

All are perfectly legitimate SF concepts. Of course, during the original run, Star Trek (like most shows from that era) was not concerned with an internal continuity between individual episodes. There are both strengths and weaknesses to this approach. One of the strengths is that there's plenty of room for later writers and fans to have fun coming up with theories of their own to explain apparent inconsistencies.

Tarzan vs. Pirates

If you are a pirate--don't mess with Tarzan.

Actually, if you are any sort of bad guy, you shouldn't mess with Tarzan. In 1951, writer Dick Van Buren and artist Bob Lubbers (who is excellent and should be better remembered than he is) showed us that this bit of wisdom particularly applies to pirates.

It begins with Tarzan on a small boat, trying to get back to mainland Africa after having an adventure on an island. He sees a ship, which would normally be a good thing. But this particular ship is a pirate vessel, commanded by a sadistic captain named Aved. Aved's second in command is a brutal Englishman called by the unoriginal name of Limey.

The pirates suspect Tarzan of working for a local trader named Philip Toll--someone the pirates have been robbing blind recently. They string the Ape Man up by his thumbs, but Tarzan works loose and we are treated to a very well-choreographed fight scene. Tarzan keeps moving, employing hit-and-run tactics against the pirate crew and pulling off a Douglas Fairbanks inspired rip-down-the-sail-with-his-knife manuever.

Tarzan eventually jumps over the side. He fakes getting hit when shot at and manages to get away, eventually making it to shore. Here, he meets Philip Toll, the trader whose life is being made miserable by the pirates.

So far, its been a fun, fast-paced adventure, highlighted by Lubbers' kinetic and detailed art work, highlighting Tarzan's skill and cleverness when fighting as an individual.

The next sequence, though, is something that makes this particular story arc stand out for me. We are reminded that Tarzan isn't always a lone hero. When the situation calls for it, he is a more-than-capable leader and a brilliant tactician. (Leading the Wazari against slave traders in The Return of Tarzan comes to mind as an excellent example of this from the original novels.)

Tarzan comes up with a plan to equip Toll's ship with a ram. They sail out to fight the pirates, discovering that Aved actually has two ships now. The ram, followed by a boarding party, takes out one ship and removes Limey from consideration. But Aved's ship sails into a cove protected by cannon.

Toll thinks they are stalemated. But Tarzan, of course, has a clever plan. Half the men in Toll's crew can be floated ashore in barrels. Tarzan will lead the others ashore, swimming underwater while using reeds as snorkels.  This will get everyone past the cannon and allow for a two-pronged sneak attack.

Though there are a few tense moments when Tarzan's group is outnumbered while waiting for the other group to show up, but in the end the pirates are overwhelmed.

The story arc ends with a Tarzan vs. Aved sword duel, made interesting by the fact that as skilled in hand-to-hand combat as Tarzan is, he's not a trained fencer. Aved is. But Tarzan muscles through the fight and brings Aved's piratical career to an abrupt end.

Tarzan often is a lone hero and that's fine--he's well-qualified for that role. But one of his important character traits is his ability to act as a leader of men and come up with clever, innovative tactics to win a battle. Van Buren and Lubbers were well aware of this when they gave us this particular story arc. Both script and art come together to give us an exciting adventure in which we are reminded that Tarzan can outsmart us all as well as outfight any of us.

Next week, it's back to the Lost Valley for another visit with Turok and Andar.

Cover Cavalcade

An adorable cover from 1954. The artist is unidentified.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Last Martian" 8/7/56

A man claims to be the last surviving Martian, whose consciousness has been somehow transferred into the body of an Earthman.

It might be a mistake to simply assume he's delusional.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Set a Thief to Catch a Thief

David Dodge's novel To Catch a Thief was published in 1952. It was one of the many books that's been on my "I gotta get around to reading this one day" list due to its excellent reputation.

And, now that I've read it, I see why it has that reputation. It is a truly suspenseful story with a strong plot and some very sharp characterizations.

In the late 1930s, John Robie was an American with acrobatic training who ends up stranded in Europe without any money. So he discovers a new use for his training. He becomes a highly successful cat burglar known at Le Chat ("The Cat").

Robie turns out to be really, really good at stealing from the rich and giving to--well, to himself. But as good as he is, no one's luck lasts forever. In 1939, he's caught and sentenced to 20 years in prison. But World War 2 gives him a chance (along with a lot of his prison mates) to get away. He then spends the war fighting for the Resistance. When the war ends, he retires to a country farm and plans to live an honest life from then on. He's technically still wanted, but because of his war-time activity, the few people who know who he is look the other way.

Until someone starts robbing the rich again--using the exact same methods Robie had used over a decade earlier. Naturally, the cops think Robie has gone back to his old ways. His comrades from the Resistance( referred to as masquisards) are in trouble because of this as well--a lot of them returned to less-than-completely-legal lifestyles after the war and now the cops are putting pressure on them in order to catch The Cat.

As much to help his old friends as to help himself, Robie must catch the real thief, using his own experience to predict possible targets for theft, then set a trap.

A lot of the meat of the novel comes from the exploration of Robie's character. He's honest now, but he reformed out of self-interest rather than any real moral epiphany. We still like him and root for him because he does have courage, quick wits and a strong sense of loyalty to his friends. But he's still a thief at heart.

In fact, this comes back to bite him during the novel. His Resistance friends know the real situation and he gets help from them throughout the novel. But he can't bring himself to trust any of the "honest" people he knows--even those he rationally knows would believe him and help him out.

To quote from the book:

All three [referring to the three most important non-criminal characters] had been his friends. All three would still be his friends if they knew the truth, and yet his whole instinct was against telling any of them. The feeling was as strong as his faith in Bellini [a criminal friend]. When he tried to analyze the reason for it, it came to him suddenly that he put his faith in Bellini and Coco and Le Borgne not because they were fellow masquisards but because they were thieves, criminals. Francie and Paul and Oriol were not.

This character interaction adds as much to the suspense as does the book's plot. But when Alfred Hitchcock made the book into a movie in 1955, this part of the story was lost in the translation.

I don't really mean that as a complaint, though, since Hitch was incapable of making a movie that isn't fun to watch. But, still, I would have loved to see that part of the book brought to the film.

Cary Grant is John Robie, with the film in many ways being very faithful to the book. And a lot of the changes that were made were clearly necessary because print and film often have different storytelling needs.

But in the film version, Robie's past is openly acknowledged, with Robie and the other former criminals being on parole because of their wartime activities. So, where Robie is on the run in the book, he has a little more freedom in the movie. The cops still think he's responsible for the new wave of thefts, but they have no hard evidence. When he teams up with an insurance agent to catch the real thief, the cops think this is a blind while he plans more thefts. Heck, even the insurance agent, played by John Williams, doesn't quite know if he can trust Robie. The interactions between Robie and the agent are a large part of what makes the movie fun.

I suppose the change might have been to conform some aspect of the Hays Code and avoid having a protagonist who technically avoids punishment for his old crimes. But a short documentary on the DVD mentions only concerns with sexual innuendo and nothing else. I haven't researched it any further than that though, so the theory I'm about to give is really just a wild guess.

But I think the change might have been in part so that Cary Grant could get to be Cary Grant throughout the film. Robie in the book spends most of his time disguised, with his head partially shaved to make him look like his going bald. He also wears a harness to simulate a pot belly. In the movie, because he's not officially on the run from the cops, Robie doesn't need a disguise.

Now Grant was an excellent actor and it might have been fun to watch him made up to be an overweight businessman. But in addition to his acting, Grant also existed to make the ladies in the audience go Ga-Ga over his looks. Also, in the '50s, movie stars were still an important box office draw. Finally, the lack of a disguise allowed his relationship with Francie (Grace Kelly) to be more openly flirtatious than it was in the book. So there's no way Grant was going to be kept unrecognizable behind tons of make-up for most of the movie.

This also simplified the plot to the extent that he was no longer working hand-in-hand with several masquisards while laying traps for the thief. In the movie, Robie's old comrades had all gone straight and, rather than actively helping out, were angry with him for apparently bringing the police back into their lives. Movie-Robie is more of a loner, though the insurance guy and eventually Francie do get to help him out in the end.

So does this make the movie a lesser effort than the book? Not really.  Between Hitchcock's visual artistry and the location filming in France, the movie looks absolutely magnificent. The cast is superb and the story is an excellent one. Hitch's ability to bring humor into a story without diluting the suspense is also on full display.

It's a general rule that a movie adaptation is rarely as good as the book on which it is based. The novel To Catch a Thief has an emotional depth to it that I do wish has been in the movie. But taken on its own, the movie is more fun than a barrel of cat burglars.

...And Not a Drop to Drink

A few weeks ago, we took a look at the first of the two stories featured in The Rat Patrol #3 (May 1967).  That was an entertaining and well-plotted story, so I thought it would be fun to review the other tale as well.

The Rat Patrol is a normally a mobile unit, using their two jeeps to mount surprise hit-and-run raids on the Germans, then get out of Dodge as quickly as possible. But in "...And Not a Drop to Drink," (writer unknown; Jose Delbo is the artist) has them ordered to form a static defense at an oasis. They are expected to hold the oasis so that the water is available when a major Allied attack is launched in two days.

When given the mission, Troy had bragged that his four men were as good as an army, but they are going to have to hold the oasis against a lot of German soldiers who are supported by a tank. So, when the Germans approach, the first task is to get rid of that tank.

An anti-tank mine is buried nearby, then Troy and Hitch use their jeep to lure the tank onto the mine.

That still leaves the Germans. It's here that we might expect an all-out battle scene. And, since Jose Delbo has been giving us some pretty nifty-looking action scenes throughout the issue, an all-out battle scene would have been a welcome addition to the story.

But the writer goes in a different, equally interesting direction, possibly lifted from the 1943 Bogart movie Sahara. The Gerrmans are mad with thirst. Desperate for water, they toss their guns away and charge into the oasis, where they are easily taken prisoner.

Troy has a brief tussle with the German general to capture him and that pretty much wraps up their mission. There's an interesting bit of dialogue at the end, though. Tully muses about how "This sure ain't much of a war," remarking about how its easy to fight a relatively faceless enemy, but seeing the Germans up close has uncomfortably reminded him of their humanity.  It's a nice moment and is effectively presented.

So that wraps up our visit with the Rat Patrol. Next week, we get a reminder that when you take one cool thing (say--Tarzan) and mix it with another cool thing (say--pirates), you pretty much always get a exceptionally cool story.