Only if Frank Cho was doing it. And then he'd better be committed to the WHOLE series (which means the Carthoris, Tara and Llana books also), not just the Thark / Dejah Thoris era.

I really do wish that someone would license the character and put out some good comics. I also hope that the film actually comes about this time. Before Disney got it there was talk of Robert Rodriguez directing it then Kerry Conran the guy from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was attached and then Jon Favreau. Of course that was all just in the last few years. There have been lots of attempts in the decades before that.

Regarding the Marvel series it is notable that issue 18 was by this guy named Frank Miller who went on to draw Daredevil or something...

Bill Hillman
Editor and Webmaster for the Official Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Webzines and Websites
http://www.Tarzan.com
http://www.ERBzine.com/mag

I'm now reading Tarzan, which is a little slower, but also a little deeper and more ambitious, but also wildly offensive. (Not that APOM is blameless in that regard either)

ERB seems to have been driven to write by two entirely contradictory impulses:
1. to deeply understand how men of different cultures fall victim to their own limited perspectives and get driven into needless wars.
2. to prove that the white race is inherently superior, not just to all other known races, to all races one could possibly imagine.

It's a fascinating contradiction, and one he is not entirely unaware of. The temptation is to give up on resolving it and let his books disappear into history, but he's such a wildly gifted storyteller that I think we have to grapple with it instead.

I knew about the Clampett thing but I didn't realize there had actually been footage posted somewhere. That's very cool. Honestly, the whole story of getting Barsoom on film is so convoluted that it's really its own column.

On the other hand, it's basically a one-sentence story -- "these guys were going to do it, it got stalled, the project fell through." I'm not quite ancient enough to remember the Clampett story, but I'm old enough that I remember getting excited about hearing that Ray Harryhausen was going to take it on. That was three or four deals back. Let's hope Pixar really means it.

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2008/04/10/bob-clampetts-john-carter-of-mars/

(with links in the comments section to even more info)

If this project had come through as planned, that Captain from Virginia would probably be a much bigger part of mainstream pop culture today.

Outside the comics medium, Robert Heinlein's very odd metafiction novel Number of the Beast is about four characters who are John Carter fans trying to find the alternate universe where Barsoom and Dejah Thoris are real. I mention this only to point out how, unlike Tarzan, simply having heard of John Carter is a sort of lodge sign or password letting us recognize someone else as a hardcore geek.

Leonaur's web site is down right now. Here's a link to the books at Barnes & Noble:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=burroughs+leonaur

I love seeing the covers though. I might try to track the first of the series eventually.

I had it written in my HEAD...

I used to have the complete set of Ballantine Tarzans with the Adams covers, as well as all 11 Mars novels (with cover art by Mike Whelan). Sold both sets off for drinking money back in the bad old days. Sigh.