Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site Since 1996 ~ Over 10,000 Web Pages in Archive Presents Volume 4979

Eclectica Archive

ECLECTICA v.2014.06

Eclectica Archive

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2014 ECOF and Dum-Dum Conventions

www.ERBzine.com/dumdum
!!! THIS WEEKEND !!!

FARGO 2014 ECOF :: JUNE 19-22

Tarzan and the Tarzana Tribe Swing into Las Vegas
International Licensing Expo 2014
Click for full-screen images



Jim Sullos ~ Cathy Wilbanks ~ Dejah Burroughs ~ Linda Burroughs ~ Llana Jane Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter Warlord of Mars" Returns to the Stars in All-New Digital WebComic
All New "John Carter Warlord of Mars" Adventure Strip Just Launched  – with a Spanish language option! (June 14, 2014 – Tarzana, CA) Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the company founded by the author to protect and maintain his original literary creations, announced today that Burroughs’ first adventure hero – John Carter of Mars – will star in an all-new digital comic strip series to be penned by legendary comics scribe Roy Thomas and illustrated by renowned artist Rodolfo Pérez Garcia, better known to Mexican comics fans as Pegaso.
 The new series, to be called “John Carter Warlord of Mars,” debuts on June 14, joining other classic Burroughs creations like Tarzan, Korak the Killer, Carson of Venus and Pellucidar as part of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Digital Comic Strip Service www.edgarriceburroughs.com/comics JOHN CARTER: WARLORD OF MARS This digital initiative comes on the heels of the reacquisition by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. of comic book and comic strip rights that had been held by Walt Disney Pictures and its Marvel Entertainment subsidiary.
And the company is pleased to announce a brand new license with Dynamite Entertainment which will return the original "John Carter Warlord of Mars" to comic books!
Dynamite will also republish other John Carter assets, going back as far as the early 1940s comic strips by John Coleman Burroughs, the son of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

“Over the years, the exploits of John Carter of Mars have been presented by a who’s who of comic book greats,
including Gil Kane, Marv Wolfman, Murphy Anderson, Joe Jusko, Carmine Infantino, Dave Cockrum, Rudy Nebres, Jesse Marsh, Gaylord Du Bois, Bruce Jones and Bret Blevins,” said James Sullos, President of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.
“We’re proud to be able to add Roy Thomas and Pegaso to this distinguished heritage and, like so many fans, we can’t wait to see what adventures they have in store for us.”

As with all the series featured at edgarriceburroughs.com/comics, the first four episodes of “John Carter Warlord of Mars” will be available at no charge.
Fans can gain unlimited access to the entire site and all the strips from the beginning for only $1.99 per month or $21.99 per year.

About the Edgar Rice Burroughs Digital Comic Strips Service
Regularly updated and expertly curated, the Edgar Rice Burroughs Digital Comic Strips service offers all new web comic adventures based on the classic characters and stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Current offerings include:
JOHN CARTER WARLORD OF MARS™ by Roy Thomas, Pegaso, Salvador López, Carolina Sánchez, Guadalupe Rivera and Olivia Peña
KORAK THE KILLER™ by Ron Marz, Rick Leonardi, Neeraj Menon and Troy Peteri
THE MUCKER™ by Ron Marz, Lee Moder, Neeraj Menon and Troy Peteri
TARZAN OF THE APES™ by Roy Thomas, Pablo Marcos and Oscar Gonzalez
THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN™ by Roy Thomas and Tom Grindberg
CARSON OF VENUS™ by Martin Powell, Thomas Floyd and Diana Leto
THE ETERNAL SAVAGE™ by Martin Powell and Steven E. Gordon
THE WAR CHIEF™ by Martin Powell and Nik Poliwko
THE CAVE GIRL™ by Martin Powell and Diana Leto
PELLUCIDAR™ by Chuck Dixion and Gary Kwapisz
THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT™ by Martin Powell, Pablo Marcos and Oscar Gonzalez­

About Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.
Founded in 1923 by Edgar Rice Burroughs himself, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. holds numerous trademarks and the rights to all literary works of the author still protected by copyright. The company has overseen every adaptation of his literary works in publishing, film, television, theatrical stage productions, licensing and merchandising. The company is still a very active enterprise and manages and licenses the vast archive of Mr. Burroughs' literary works, fictional characters and corresponding artworks that have grown for over a century. The company continues to be owned by the Burroughs' family and remains headquartered in Tarzana, California, the town named after the Tarzana Ranch Mr. Burroughs purchased there in 1918 which led to the town's future development. For more information, please visit EdgarRiceBurroughs.com.

For free sample strips and subscription information, please visit
www.EdgarRiceBurroughs.com/comics

The Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Team
James J. Sullos, Jr. | President | Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.
 PO Box 570277 | Tarzana CA 91357 | 818.344.0181
www.edgarriceburroughs.com

Available NOW from Titan and all booksellers	Available in November 2014

TARZAN SWINGS INTO CANADA

We've attended all the Tarzan Musical Premier Opening Nights
BROAD WAY ~ HOLLAND ~ HAMBURG
Now, at last. . . a production much closer to home . . . Brandon, MB
2 kms to the south

TARZAN THE MUSICAL REPORTS IN ERBzine Tarzan: The Musical HOLLAND | BROADWAY HAMBURG | UTAH

Tarzan by William Brent	Richard Hescox: A former Dum-Dum Guest of Honour Artist

Shiny Stones Rare Tarzan art by Neal Adams	Flash Gordon by Frank Frazetta Ref: Frazetta Girls FB

Tarzine 82 (original series) Visit the Current Tarzine Series

See this and the other Tarzan Daily Strips Rex Maxon Reprints

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” Elton John once said. “In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.” Wrong, American astronomer Percival Lowell would have said if he hadn’t … I guess … died 100 years ago. Also, what do you mean there’s no one there to raise them? What about you, dummy?
Fantastically Wrong
It's OK to be wrong, even fantastically so. Because when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From folklore to pure science, these are history’s most bizarre theories.

Our man Lowell, you see, was quite convinced that an alien race occupied Mars, though he never directly commented on their potential as babysitters for human astronauts. And he even had the evidence to prove they existed: an immense network of canals carved into the Martian surface that he spied through a telescope.

This saga begins in 1888, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced that he had observed what he called canali on Mars, drawing the sketch below. You might be thinking that Martians would seem to struggle with the whole digging in a straight line thing, but to Schiaparelli, these were purely natural features of the landscape. That’s because canali is Italian for channels, not canals.
caption

Giovanni Schiaparelli’s sketch of canali on Mars.
Notice Elysium at top right. Schiaparelli’s idea of paradise
was apparently misery on an inhospitable planet. Image: Wikimedia

That’s not how it was translated into English, though.

So, along comes Lowell, who takes the idea of “canals” on Mars and gets … a bit carried away with it. In 1894 he built the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, with a world-class telescope, so he might prove that a desperate Martian race had built “a system whose end and aim is the tapping of the snow-cap for the water there semiannually let loose; then to distribute it over the planet’s surface.”

In 1906 he published, no joke, a 400-page tome on the topic, in which he named and mapped an astonishing number of canals that interconnected around the entire planet, in some places forming vast oases, which “are clearly ganglia to which the canals play the part of nerves.” He then proceeded to exhaustively — and, quite frankly, a bit exhaustingly — reason that if “the environment be suitable life will ensue,” but not “until the creatures had reached a certain phase in evolution would their presence become perceptible.”

The incredibly gorgeous, decidedly canal-free surface of Mars.
At left is a smiling crater: Astronomers believe Mars to be among the happiest of planets. (An aside: This is a common trope still bandied around about evolution, that there are milestones creatures reach, like us humans with our brains. In reality, critters can develop incredibly complex features such as, say, eyes, then go and lose them in a pitch-black ecosystem like a cave. There are no “phases” to evolution, just continuous adaptation to an environment — or stagnation as a living fossil, if you hit the sweet spot.)

Anyway, the cooperation the aliens achieved in their task, he marvels, puts our own belligerence as a species, our “boyish and unthinking element of the nation,” to shame. He concludes, rather enigmatically and triumphantly: “That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be.”

Today we have the hindsight of knowing that what Schiaparelli and Lowell observed was simply an optical illusion. Telescopes had only been invented at the turn of the 17th century, and were nowhere near as sophisticated as the monstrously powerful devices that can today peer billions of light years out into the universe.

Ever get so carried away with an idea that you spend a fortune building an observatory to prove it?
I see you back there, Percival Lowell. Come on, raise that hand. Image: Wikimedia

Subsequent mapping of the surface of Mars of course found no such canals, and thankfully none of NASA’s rovers have yet tumbled into the greatest public works project the solar system has (n)ever known. We now know, though, that water likely flowed freely on Mars long ago, but today is almost exclusively locked in the polar caps, with liquid water perhaps flowing from time to time.

Lowell was wrong, sure, really wrong, but his study of the Martian surface and the consequent debate most certainly advanced our understanding of the Red Planet. And his observatory? In 1930, Clyde William Tombaugh peered through its telescope and discovered the planet Pluto, whose existence Lowell himself had predicted.

So yeah, alright, they were maybe wrong about it being a planet. It’s really a dwarf planet and Kuiper-belt object. But we only decided that a few years ago (after much debate among astronomers — some folks in fact vehemently demand it immediately regain its erstwhile title, particularly these third-graders). It’s all just semantics, really.

Like the difference between channel and canal, for instance.

Taylor Kitsch Says the 'John Carter' Sequel Had an 'Awesome' Script
Variety, io9 and First Showing ~ May 28, 2014
This is something we'll probably hear over and over again, at least until Disney (or someone else) gives John Carter of Mars another shot. Canadian actor Taylor Kitsch, who last appeared in Lone Survivor but really hasn't done much since then, spoke to Variety recently (via The Playlist) and at the end chatted briefly about John Carter. I know I'm not the only one who actually enjoyed John Carter and wished there was a sequel, but of course it's unlikely we'll ever see one. In the meantime, we can always start the discussion again with quotes like this until Hollywood takes notice. Kitsch, who plays John Carter, spoke about the sequel's script.

At the beginning, Variety asked him if the "bad press" for the movie was a painful experience. "I mean, look man, it wasn't an uplifting experience. My biggest regret would have been if I didn't do enough personally. If I didn't give it everything I had. If I hadn't prepped enough. I don't have that regret, so that allows me to let go." That's a great attitude to have, and I know I have respect for him for playing the role with vigor, even though it wasn't that well received. When asked if he wishes "there would have been a sequel", Kitsch says:

    I miss the family. I miss Andrew Stanton. I know the second script was fucking awesome. We had to plant a grounding, so we could really take off in the second one. The second one was even more emotionally taxing, which was awesome.

That actually sounds about right. The first movie had a big setup, and it needed to focus on introducing us to the story, the conceit of how Carter gets to Mars, and the emotional connection between the two worlds. Once that is established, then they can go wild, and anyone who has read the books or comic books knows there is an endless amount of story material to pull from for more sequels/stories set on Mars (and beyond). Director Andrew Stanton was the showrunner on this, writing the script for the first movie in addition to directing, and it's likely he wrote the sequel, too - which Kitsch calls "fucking awesome". But as of 2012, all hope for a sequel was gone, with Disney admitting an official $200 million loss. It's unlikely we'll ever see it.

Then again, stranger things have happened. And one day, with enough fan support (there was a petition once before), it could happen. Though I'm sure they will throw out Stanton's script that Kitsch is referring to before starting. Do you still want to see a John Carter sequel? Is there any hope it might happen one day?

This is what Andrew Stanton had in mind
Andrew Stanton has tweeted the title cards to the John Carter movies we'll never see.
JOHN CARTER STILL LIVES!
The new John Carter: Warlord of Mars “adventure strip” episodes will make their online debut in early summer as part of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Digital Comic Strip Service at www.edgarriceburroughs.com/comics.  Written by the legendary Roy Thomas, with art by Pegaso (Rodolfo Perez Garcia) of Mexico City, this series will invite readers to accompany John Carter and his compatriots on exciting adventures that delve into the rich, storied history of Barsoom (as the inhabitants of Mars refer to their planet).  As with the other nine series featured on the site, including Tarzan and Carson of Venus, the first four episodes of John Carter: Warlord of Mars will be viewable at no charge.

DUMBING IT DOWN By John Martin Dumbing it down for a children's book, Sexing it up for porn... One never knows what will happen next, After a classic is born. The original writer conjures a yarn, Employing his skills and craft, Then sends it off to an editor's desk And out comes the final draft. The story appears in a magazine; The writer scratches his head. "I don't remember writing that!" (But the check buys his family some bread.) The rights are sold for the silver screen; The director has some ideas: "We'll cast a blonde in the brunette's role, "And say, "That's just show biz!" The graphic novel is next to appear, Or call it a comic book, "We'll give the hero a tragic past "With kind of an Elvis look." And then one day some fan, by chance, Exploring an old book store, Finds a faded Grosset there on the shelf And forks out a few bucks more. He takes it home and gives it a read, And says to himself, "Not bad! "It's almost a different story, "Than all of the versions I've had." "There really wasn't a pressing need "For others to sugar-coat it; "It works just fine as a thrilling tale "In the way that the guy first wrote it." ~Bridge