Tarzan on Mars: A Brief History

Sorry about the long lack of updates. Work, the weather, a few computer problems and some back up on reading has led to this. Hopefully I can get caught back up here (and yes I will catch up on Dynamite's Lord of the Jungle series with issues 11 and 12 soon). With that out of the way...

With the recent announcement of The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs and more recent novels and anthologies like Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan and Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom I became interested in the first attempt to continue ERB's legacy on the printed page. That book was Tarzan on Mars and it's story is an interesting one.

The man behind the project was Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer, who decided that Burroughs' characters needed a new writer to carry on their adventures. Having worked with Burroughs himself in the pages of Amazing Stories (including the last John Carter of Mars story, Skeleton Men of Jupiter), Palmer hired writer Stuart J. Bryne to write a new novel. Under the pen name John Bloodstone, Byrne wrote out a novel that found Lord Greystoke heading to Barsoom to rescue both Jane Clayton and La. But while the book was written with plans for further novels it was cancelled following legal action from the Burroughs estate. For a long time the book was a mere footnote, an urban legend that few had read or had seen. (I said it was a brief history didn't I?)

However thanks to ERBZine the book is available in PDF format http://www.erbzine.com/mag19/novel/Tarzan_On_Mars.pdf along with a more longer history of its origins http://www.erbzine.com/mag19/1930.html. I've been reading it for a while now and well it's interesting if not wholly successful. Or to put it another way, Bryne/Bloodstone is not Edgar Rice Burroughs with the setup intriguing but taking a long time to get up and running. But I'll finish it soon enough and post my complete thoughts then.

The idea of Tarzan going to Barsoom has been explored later on, most notably in the Tarzan comic strip in the mid-1990s and Dark Horse's Tarzan/John Carter Warlords of Mars limited comic book series. Even one of the upcoming stories announced for the Worlds anthology is "Tarzan and the Martian Invaders" so there seems to be a desire to see this particular story told. So we'll see if another writer tackles this in the future. Until next time and I promise I'll get those reviews up soon!