All kidding aside, I have a lot of affection for Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ second best-known creation. John Carter – Southern gentleman, Confederate Civil War veteran and sentient Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot – makes his appearance in the first issue/chapter of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s second volume. It is not an accessible opening. The story begins on Mars before the Martian invasion of Earth as shown in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and doubles as both an opening battle and a way for Moore and O’Neill to paint their portrait of Mars: a strange, Arabian-influenced mashup of the Barsoom novels, Edwin L. Arnold’s Lieutenant Gullivar Jones and C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. It’s a really intricate opening, but Moore essentially drops you into very unfamiliar territory and we don’t meet up with the team we’d gotten to know from the first volume until the last page of it.
Reading A Princess of Mars gave me a real appreciation for what O’Neill does in that issue/chapter. He perfectly nails the green men of Mars and the thoats they ride. I still need to read Arnold and Lewis’ work, but I felt like I “got” that section when I re-read it after reading the first Barsoom book, and I enjoyed it a lot more.
The best way to describe the Barsoom novels is meatheaded. I mean that in the best possible way. The first three books are a rollicking, nonstop adventure where John Carter meets a bunch of strange aliens, earning the trust and eternal friendship of some while viciously slaughtering others. Yet despite the destruction and bloody death, despite how John Carter once says he doesn’t feel bad about the people he kills because he’s awesome at fighting and he’s proud of it just like someone would be proud of their knitting, my mental image of Carter is still of an overgrown kid whacking invisible bad guys with a foam bat. There’s an innocence to the whole thing that makes you just roll with the “Woo! Fighting is awesome!” tone of the books.
I think the reason I’m so willing to go along with it is that, other than the problematic racial overtones which I’ll get into in a minute, John Carter himself is a likeable hero for the time period. He respects his allies and makes friends with people of all races and both sexes. A lot of sci-fi and pulp writers would make a planet where everyone walks around mostly naked into a skeevy creepfest, but John Carter is a doofus when it comes to romantic relationships and loyal to Dejah Thoris, and he never leers over her or any other woman.
As a female reader, the strength of the female characters is another draw to the novel. Even when they have to play damsel in distress (and, don’t misunderstand me, they do that a lot), they fight back while enslaved and help John Carter defeat the bad guys. They also make friends with each other, and, in some instances, defend each other from the women on the “bad” side. Dejah Thoris is allied with Sola and Thuvia in the same way John Carter is allied with Tars Tarkas and Kantos Kan. Granted, I’m not positive that the series passes the Bechdel test, but it’s at least nice to see.
The world is also very vividly drawn – I think there are reasons most artists draw the green men of Barsoom, standing many feet tall with multiple arms and tusks, with a degree of consistency. The descriptions Burroughs uses in creating his Mars are specific and memorable without being overwhelming.
However, when this entry started I compared the John Carter novels to James Cameron’s Avatar, and like that story, the Barsoom novels are about the special space honky who needs to save the native races in a land where he wasn’t born. A Princess of Mars’s first chapter starts horribly, with John Carter being chased by a group of American Indians he refers to as “savages.” Also, he’s a Confederate soldier, so you can draw your own conclusions there. He hides in a cave and, praying to the God Ares because he loves war just that darn much, he is transported via astral projection to Mars, where he has naked adventures being better and more powerful than everyone else because of how his physiognomy reacts to Mars (i.e., the gravity of Earth is stronger so he is stronger, a la Superman).
Yet despite the opening where John Carter disparages the “red men,” when the first human-like Martian appears in the books, Dejah Thoris, she looks pretty much exactly like an American Indian. He falls deeply in love with her and makes friends with others like her. In Gods and Warlord, Carter meets aliens who look like black people and Pacific Asian people. While they are hostile at first, he makes allies among a few of them, who go on to lead their own people, proving that none of them are inherently bad. In fact, the only inherently bad race seem to be the Martians that look like white men, who exploit all races of Martians by setting themselves as false Gods in a false paradise and believe themselves to be inherently superior.
Sometimes when reading this I got the same feeling I did reading The Marvelous Land of Oz. The first sequel to The Wizard of Oz, the book involves the Scarecrow being ousted as ruler of the Emerald City by a group of women from all four corners of Oz who want women to have all the jobs and run the land and have the men take care of the house. The women are defeated by a boy named Tip and his companions, all of whom are men, and all women stop working and become housewives again. However, at the end of the book Glinda meets Tip and tells him that he’s actually Ozma, the lost Princess of Oz, and to ascend the throne he must become the girl he is meant to be. It’s a book that seems to start off as an exercise in sexism but at the end makes you wonder if it’s a parody, or whether or not the contradiction seems to be on purpose.
Then again, [SPOILER] the last scene of The Warlord of Mars is a meeting where all those Martian races decide to elect John Carter the supreme ruler of the planet, so it may just be racist after all.
Is This Book Worth Reading? Yes, it’s a lot of fun. But watch out for racism.
Will This Book Enhance My Reading of League? Definitely.
For Further Reading:
A Princess of Mars
The Gods of Mars
Warlord of Mars
Stop #3: Moonchild by Aleister Crowley (I mean it this time)
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