One Night in a Canadian Bar

  "You look like a man after some good Canadian whiskey, eh mate?" said the wiry bartender.

  Ed Burroughs, who had just swaggered into the bar with some of his privileged friends, glared at the innkeeper as he placed his right forearm on the bar and leaned over, reaching out with his left paw, calloused from many bar fights, and grabbed the little alcohol pusher by his shirt.

  "Listen, you little piece of possum puke," Ed snarled. "I don't want any of your Canadian rotgut. You can give me a sarsaparilla, and make it snappy."

  Ed released the bartender, who hurried to do his bidding. The minor fracas caught the attention of another bar patron, a 300-pound northwoods logger, unshaven, filthy dirty, and clenching a half-burned cigar in his yellowed teeth, though the fire had gone out because it had burned far enough to interact with the saliva-soaked end of the wad of brown leaves.

  "Sarsaparilla?" he mocked. "Anybody drinks at this bar had better drink whiskey. Bartender! Give this guy a shot of CCC, on me. And he better drink it all. Besides," his eyes traveled over ERB's receding hairline, "it'll put some fur back on that shiny dome of yours."

  Ed took the proffered drink, sniffed it, and then splattered it into the face of the lumberjack.

  "Why you...." the behemoth sprayed. He wiped off his chin with the sleeve of his red and white-checked shirt. "I'm gonna murdelize you."

  Before the logger could even clench his fist, however, Ed glided into his whirling dervish stance which he had studied for some years in Persia, with slight modifications of his own design, which included flying fists and surprise kicks in sensitive spots of his opponents. Within seconds, his hapless adversary was lying on the barroom floor, curled up into a fetal position, moaning, "No, don't hit me anymore."

  Ed, ever the gentleman, helped the besotted woodsman to his feet and handed him a glass of sarsaparilla. "Here," he said. "This will make you feel better."

  The ax-man gladly took the refreshment and began sipping it gingerly. "Say, dat's not bad," he said. "In fact, I kinda like it."

 "It grows on you," said Ed.

  "Hey," said the Canadian. "You ever thought about writing adventure stories. You probably have a lot of experience to draw from."

  "As a matter of fact," said Ed, "my imagination has been running wild lately. I've got this idea for a kind of a super specimen of mankind who was raised among savages and can clean anybody's clock."

  "Savages?" said the Canuck. "You mean like a man who was raised in de jungle?"

  "Oh no," laughed Ed. "I don't know anything about the jungle. My character will be much wilder. He'll be from the streets of Chicago and his name will be Bill the Burner, or Billy Burner, or something like that.

  "But," he continued. "Your idea about the jungle is a good one, too. I'll give that some thought. But you realize, I hope, that as an ignorant day laborer from America's northern provinces, you really have no business telling such story ideas to me or any other."

~ John "Bridge" Martin

STAR WARS CONNECTION
Some have even criticized the JOHN CARTER (OF MARS) 2012 film as being a rip-off of Star Wars.
George Lucas has admitted to being heavily influenced by the John Carter stories of a hundred years ago.

"Originally, I wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, with all the trimmings, but I couldn't obtain all the rights.
"So I began researching and found where (Flash Gordon creator) Alex Raymond got his idea:
The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially his John Carter series of books.
"I found that what sparked Burroughs was Edwin Arnold's 'Gulliver on Mars' published in 1905, 
the first story of this genre I've been able to trace....
"Young people today don't have a fantasy life anymore.... The films they see are movies of disasters,
insecurity and realistic violence. They seem to be having a very boring childhood."
~ George Lucas in Science Fiction Review 24, 12/77
http://www.erbzine.com/mag8/0871.html

THE INFLUENCE OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
IN POPULAR FICTION OF THE 20th & 21st CENTURY
Master of Adventure ~ Creator of John Carter and Tarzan ~ Grandfather of American Science Fiction
http://www.erbzine.com/mag28/2875.html
Many Star Wars-related quotes here.

Comics’ Sweeping Graphic Novel, Prince Valiant, Turns 80
by Brian M. Kane ~ An Article for King Features Syndicate

Before television, when most films were still black & white, theSunday comics were an oasis of color in a Depression-era gray world. Highly popular comic strips drove newspaper sales in the early twentieth century, so it is little wonder why their creators were regarded as celebrities. The epic Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur by Harold Rudolf “Hal” Foster premiered in the color comics section on February 13, 1937. Prior to Prince Valiant, Foster originated the adult protagonist adventure strip genre by adapting Tarzan as a black & white daily strip in 1928, which was followed by the Tarzan color Sunday feature from 1931-1937. Faced with imposing financial and creative constraints as a work-for-hire artist, Foster focused his considerable skills as an illustrator towards producing his own strip. The extraordinary effort resulted in international prominence for both Prince Valiant and Foster. Today, after 80 years, “Val” remains one of the few adventure strip characters still in print.

It is difficult to imagine the impact Foster’s Prince Valiant had on 1930s and 1940s popular culture. When Prince Valiant began, Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1 was still over a year away. Many of the first two generations of comic book creators owe a great debt to Foster. Young comic book artists studied Foster’s technique, sometimes copying panels from his strips. “Swipes” of Foster’s art can be found in the origin of Batman, and comics drawn by Jack Kirby, the cocreator of many of today’s movie heroes, including Captain America, The Avengers, The X-Men and Thor. Most importantly, Val epitomized a knightly moral code, creating an ethical standard of conduct that exemplified truth, justice, and what it meant to be a hero.

Seminal works such as The Hobbit, The Sword in the Stone, and The Chronicles of Narnia were nonexistent in February of 1937. By the time Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published, Prince Valiant had already spent twelve years on his own monomythic hero’s journey. Yet, unlike Campbell, Val’s adventures included strong, self-reliant, heroic women; attesting to Hal’s wife, Helen’s influence on the strip. To the uninitiated, Valiant, a lowly Prince of Thule, fell in love with and eventually married Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles. To Hal’s and Helen’s credit, Aleta became a role model for the millions of capable women running America during World War II; fighting off offenders with her wit, charm, intelligence, and, on occasion, a hidden dagger strapped to her thigh. Aleta was kicking butt long before Princess Leia, Katniss Everdeen, or most of the Disney princesses were even a thought.

Though set in the time of King Arthur, Foster’s Prince Valiant was surprisingly contemporary. During World War II, Val fought the Huns, resulting in the strip being canceled in German newspapers. In 1943, Val befriended a boy with a withered leg who could not “play soldier” with the other boys. Nevertheless, the boy was encouraged to hone his skills so that one day he could be “arrow-maker to King Arthur.” The story appeared a year into a polio epidemic and 16 months after Pearl Harbor, and was a call to service to all who could not go off to fight. After the war, as American troops returned home, Val and Aleta sailed to the “New World” and had a son, heralding the coming baby boom. Then, as the demographics of 1950s America changed, multi-cultural couples in Prince Valiant married and had children just as they did in the popular sitcom I Love Lucy.

Foster’s Prince Valiant is not just an adventure, or romance, or humor strip—though it is sprinkled with all those elements. Prince Valiant is a graphic novel about life where people fall in love, wars are fought, children are born and grow older, hearts are broken, friends die in battle, couples marry,and even disfigured and disabled characters young and old, male and female have a place and purpose in this brave world Foster fashioned. While some may feel Prince Valiant is archaic by today’s standards, perhaps its unabashedly inclusive “Might for Right” message is simply ahead of its time. Long live Val!

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Brian M. Kane, Ph.D. is the author of the IPPY Award-winning biography Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators, and edits the New York Times Best-Selling Prince Valiant reprint series from
Fantagraphics Books.