Sunday, October 31, 2010

Warlord of Mars

If you've got $1.00 and are looking for the best way to spend it - look no further than Dynamite's introductory issue of Warlord of Mars!

I'm a big fan of the Edgar Rice Burroughs tales of John Carter of Mars, so usually, I find myself having very high expectations for comics based on the series.I've seen some good adaptations - like Marvel's from the 70's which Dark Horse is collecting in one oversized TPB.

And I've seen some bad ones - like the DC version, which strangely enough Dark Horse is also collecting...

For Completist Dark Horse is also collecting the Jesse Marsh version from Dell

But back to the newest version - normally, I cringe when I see comics based on classic adventure stories, simply because so many seem to just miss the mark (like DC's current Doc Savage series.) However with this first issue, I can tell that writer, Arvid Nelson has decided to take his time and reveal the character of John Carter in a way I've never seen before. We see more of John Carter's time on Earth than we ever do in the books. And while such a thing might sound boring, Nelson found a way to introduce us to the character with an ERB level of action.

As you can see artist Stephen Sadowski has done a spectacular job illustrating the comic and his version of John Carter could be my favorite comic version yet.

In addition to the nice backstory we get on John Carter, Nelson also juggles a subplot with Tars Tarkas that's quite interesting as well.

So in keeping with the spirit of the book, allow me to give it 4 thumbs up! ;)

For today's Free Comics, I'm going to present two ERB related downloads that while not comics are definitely worth checking out.

The first is a PDF of the first John Carter of Mars book, which is rightly in public domain.

[ Princess of Mars ]

The other is cbr of The Martian, the collected newspaper strips from 1958 which recounts the story of Princess of Mars.

[ The Martian ]

Enjoy!

- Jim

2 comments:

Reno said...

I just hope Sadowski is in this for the duration. The art on Project Superpowers quickly went downhill after he left that title (although I got tired of that title because I didn't like the story).

I'm very excited that Dark Horse will be releasing the John Carter Marvel series. The original issues were printed very muddily and didn't do justice to Gil Kane's art. Hopefully Dark Horse will reproduce the art in high quality.

As for the DC series, it started out well enough with the Gray Morrow art, but it started as a back-up feature and the stories tended to be truncated becaue of the limited pages.

Not really a fan of Jesse Marsh (I didn't like his Tarzan) so I guess that's the collection I'm least interested in.

Guest said...

All of these series of cartoons are really very interesting specially for kids. Sometime i like to watch it with my kids when i have free time from bestessays job. I will tell them here is a new series of cartoons for them.

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