I recently read John Carter Warlord of Mars Annual 3 from 1979. It was the last issue of the John Carter run at Marvel. I was never a big fan of JCWM..I purchased John Carter #2 in the 70's when I was a kid and that was the extent of my history with the character. I got the annual for $1.00. It was in below average condition, but I don't collect comics and pay a lot of money, I like the old, used cheapies and that is good enough for me. I will usually read them 1-2 times and then sell them(although I will probably end up keeping anything from the Bronze age because I enjoy that period the most). I appreciate this character a bit more now and will target the title whenever I find it at a reasonable price.

I think that Marvel's JC:WoM is a somewhat underrated title. I have a full run of all 28 issues, plus the three annuals and, while it's not amazing, there's some real top tier Bronze Age writing and artistic talent on the book: Marv Wolfman, Gil Kane, Chris Claremont, Carmine Infantino etc. The trouble was that, as a series, it really wasn't very "new reader friendly", since the standard series was essentially made up of two mammoth 12 or 13-part story arcs. As a result, the annuals make for a much easier casual read than most of the issues in the regular series do.

I dunno, it's not a series I love or anything, but I would never get rid of my issues...so it must have something, I guess.

Not exactly a comic, but...



I bought this last september, but i suspect it already sits in a card box in my garage since my last move after being purchased back in 2004. I must say I dn't remember reading it, but who knows... Nevertheless, it is very deep insight into the creative process of one of my absolute favorite artist, his views on colaborating, how he became the first inker editors hire to impose his own style over the pencilers, his views on lettering and coloring, and more tan anything, a huge amount of rough pencils and ink comparisons, plus some rare art.

Kull and Red Sonja both had longer runs in total than Weird World (the classic Moench property not the new iteration), so if that is a success, those must be too. Thongor had about the same number of appearances in Creatures on the Loose that Weird World did in total, so could be considered at least a partial success by that standard. If you consider all the back ups and features over the years, there were a lot more Solomon Kane pages produced than Weird World, so Marvel did have a bunch of sword and sorcery features that were long running enough to be considered successful, but most of them were Howardian in nature (either Howard characters, spinoffs of Howard characters, and/or done by frequent pastichers of Howard).

If you look at the industry as a whole, sword and sorcery had limited success at the big 2 overall. Conan did well at Marvel, and Warlord and to lesser extend Arak did well at DC, but DC had far more misses with S&S than hits-Claw, Stalker, Starfire, Ironwolf, Beowulf, etc. all tried to capture the popularity of the genre in the 70s, but none took off. Those that did take off had something different to offer than Conan, the ones that were more Conan clones were largely unsuccessful as people preferred the original to cheap knockoffs.

Iron Jaw and Wulf from Atlas were part of the same cycle of attempted cash ins, but neither had enough of an original take (though I like both for what they were) to really capture their own audience and thrive even if Atlas hadn't folded I don't see either of them as titles that would have taken off.

John Carter is more planetary romance than sword and sorcery, though there are a lot of similar trappings in both genres. I just don't think there was enough of a market in the traditional comics audience to allow more than a handful of sword and sorcery properties to thrive. Even Weird World never caught on enough to support a series long term, it got plenty of chances and tryouts beut never found a big enough audience to really thrive.

-M

I still consider Kull and Sonja to be largely by-products of Conan's success and not really their own thing. I mean you can't have Sonja without Conan, regardless of the fact that Marvel created her solely to broaden the appeal of the main book.


Not to get into semantics, but you forgot Arion: Lord Of Atlantis. Peter David at least tried to give the character a new lease on life by incorporating that mythos into the first Aqua Man mini. Warlord was also kind of a hybrid of John Carter and Conan with a dash of Turok thrown in (you could also make the argument that John Norman's Gor series inspired it as well). You wouldn't be wrong to call it a "Conan Clone", but I think it has enough going on to be slightly a cut above the rest.

Humans caged in a zoo by animals or aliens was a pretty common motif on DC covers of the '50s and early '60s. Not as common as gorillas or dinosaurs but...

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