Comic Review: Warlord of Mars #14

First a Happy New Year! I hope it will be a good one. And with that out of the way we'll kick off with a new comic book review.

When we last left off, John Carter had just landed in the Valley Dor only to discover instead of paradise a living hell. He has survived white apes, plant men, banths and has just found out that the Holy Therns are not gods but regular men. But being a man of action John decides to leave and takes his friend Tars Tarkas and the princess Thuvia with him. But before they can make their escape, the Thern stronghold is attacked by the Black Pirates of Thuria, one of their raids to claim Thern women. John, Tars and Thuvia almost escape but our overloaded in their flier and to help his friends escape John leaps out and finds himself in the midst of battle. He also meets Xodar, a Black Pirate who he fights and plans to take back to Helium to prove his story, and Phaidor, the haughty-but hot!-daughter of the Therns' leader Matai Shang. And in typical John Carter fashion things take a turn for the worse...

So far so good with this adaptation of The Gods of Mars. As usual here's the good stuff: a faithfulness to the source material-from the revelation of the Therns' vanity to Thuvia getting her revenge on her tormentor Sator Throg and her ability to control the Banths-writer Arvid Nelson has managed to keep true to Edgar Rice Burroughs without going to far off the beaten track (i.e. the Therns don't have glowing blue eyes-thank Issus) but at the same time making it accessible to people who never read the book before.

As for the artwork by Edgar Salazar, I mentioned last time I was a little taken aback by the change in artists but he does a pretty good job in this issue, capturing the look of the characters-even though in his loincloth John Carter looks more like Tarzan-but he captures the action scenes well and makes story come alive with nice uses of color. In short the art is growing on me for this run.

I'll end by saying another top job for this series, helped by some nice covers (including the one by Joe Jusko above-why couldn't they have got Joe or some of the artists working on this series to work on the movie? We might have been spared those tattoos). Enjoy the rest of the holiday!