“John Carter a pulp hero?” I can hear you ask, “John Carter of Mars?”

Yes, although he didn’t appear in a character pulp series, such as Doc Savage or The Shadow, John Carter first made his presence known in the pulp pages of All-Story magazine in 1912. Throughout his long and varied career, John Carter’s story continued to be relayed to the reading public through the media of the adventure and science fiction pulps.

As chronicled by Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known as the chronicler of Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter’s story has been reprinted numerous times in a series of eleven books. It is the continued popularity of these reprinted adventures that has somewhat obscured John Carter’s pulp origins.

Something of an immortal (though even he doesn’t know how long he has lived, or how long he might live), John Carter began his epic adventure shortly after a stint as a captain in the Army of the Confederacy. After the end of the Civil War, Carter became a prospector in Arizona. In 1866 he was chased into a cave by unfriendly Apaches, and was overcome by a mysterious gas that rendered him unconscious. Having an out-of-body experience, he walked out of the cave, looked up, and found himself strangely attracted to a bright red “star”--the planet Mars. Stretching his arms upward, he found himself drawn through the airless void of space to the red planet.