Feathered Pterosaurs?

  The alternate cover I got the other day, for one of the "Zorro in the Land That Time Forgot" issues, shows him fighting  pterosaurs that look like dimorphodon at first blush, but appear to be feathered!

   Were there feathered pterosaurs, and is there relation of the feathers of theropod bird ancestors and the fur-like structures of pterosaurs? Maybe pterosaurs are not as distant from dinosaurs (and true birds) as once thought. 

Creating a Fantasy Hero by Lin Carter

 

One huge mystery surrounding Lin Carter's Jandar of Callisto books was why, in an article by him in the second issue of Savage Tales featuring Ka-Zar in the early seventies, it was announced that "Lin Cater's Jandar of Callisto will soon be featured in Marvel's upcoming science fiction magazine Worlds Unknown" There was a comic book called that, and I searched, but never found an issues with Jandar. There was also a black and white mag called Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, also Marvel, but they never did Jandar either. My guess is that they planned such a series, but for some reason it never materialized. Similar to how DC announced that Tarzan the Terrible would follow their adaptation of Tarzan the Untamed, but it never happened, and DC cancelled Tarzan shortly after that. 

Above is the only piece of comic art known to feature Jandar, as he battles a Yahoon arthrapod. 

Anyway, this is the article by LC where he gives the secrets of Jandar, and how he crafted all the story elements to parallel ERB. No, there was never a well in Cambodia where he got the manuscripts. 

Click on each pic to blow it up. 

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Bruce Jones" Tarzan: the J H Rosny Connection

I already discussed this same tale years ago, in the post on Tarzan of the comics. But what I almost didn't think of , surprisingly, was how similar the concept behind Jones' particular story arc in the 90s Dark Horse is to Rosny's Ironcastle. When a pterosaur-like flying beast crashes a plane, the pilot (Paul D-Arnot? I really can't recall), says the was nothing like his experience, and asked if it could be an escapee from Pal-ul-don. Tarzan replies that they are far from the lost land, and that "this isn't thipdar flesh" (using the Pellucidar term for pterodactyl). I'm tempted to discuss here how the legendary Kongomatu might have come from a lost land, but never mind. So what is it? 

Other beasts that indeed resemble dinosaurs, pterosaurs, or like nothing on earth are starting to pop up locally, in the modern Congo, and no one seems to know why.

Save perhaps the mysterious girl named Kita who claims she hails from one of Africa's lost cities. Tarzan at first believes her to be lying, having seen the Cities of Fala for himself, and knows them to be in ruin. 

What they find though are the gleaming towers of a thriving civilization! Kita was telling the truth after all. After captures, escapes, and battles with mutants beasts, including a multilegged lioness and giant spider, they discover the truth: that Tarzan himself brought the spores of the Tara plant back from Barsoom. On its native world the tara plant was part of the Martian ecosystem: "The tara was eaten by the thoat, which was eaten by the banth, from whose droppings emerged again the tara." But on earth the tara has grown unchecked, having infected the local plant life, and altered the DNA of earth animals; some of them similar to those of the tara's home planet, such as the six-legged lioness. It's also revived Fala's ancient inhabitants, and allowed them to greatly augment their technology, possibly making Fala capable of conquering the world!

An alien spore affecting and taking over a foreign ecosystem, and mutating the flora and fauna.

Did this core concept originate with Rosny's Ironcastle, or is it just coincidence? 

 

Time Pockets in Tarzan's Africa?

 There are two Russ Manning story arcs in the Sunday strips that feature prehistoric creatures that take place in neither Pal-ul-don nor Pellucidar. 

  One has a villainous British officer kidnap Jane and retreat to a remote marshland with stifling heat far from any outpost or native village, thinking Tarzan will never find them. Jane and her captors are astonished to encounter a living brontosaurus, and then a mosasaur!

   Jane has no idea what the dinosaurs are doing in this part of Africa, far from the lost land of Pal-ul-don!

  The tylosaurus, crazed with hunger attacks the boat, devours several men, and Jane's captors are about to feed her to the beast in order to save themselves, when Tarzan shows up!

The mystery of the dinosaurs' presence, however, is never resolved. 

We just go into another story arc wherein Korak visits a lost civilization of kraken-worshipers, and another beautiful doomed female. Korak seems to be cursed with bringing doom on every girl he encounters, but that's a whole other topic. 

What are dinosaurs doing in Tarzan's Africa far from any lost world? 

Manning already established that Pal-ul-don (or at least his take on it in this timeline), exists in a sort of "time bubble" that allowed the prehistoric races and fauna to survive. Tarzan journeys back in time, perhaps to the mid-Cenozoic, when possibly a land-bridge or connecting continent (I've speculated), existed between Africa and South America. 

Later on, Manning suggests that other such time-bubbles exists, as the time when he, Jane, Korak and some friends attempt to exit Pal-ul-don on a sail-barge over what looks like part of the Sahara (it doesn't appear to be that great thorn desert). When they become separated in a sand storm, Tarzan stumbles across a war party of ancient Egyptian solider, as realizes that "the jungle is not the only place that harbors doorways through time". Afterward, of course, the story of the Stone Pharoah unfolds.

The other Manning tale to feature prehistoric beasts is the "Mammoth Amazons," in which Korak encounters a civilization of amazon warrior women who ride wooly mammoths. How did the giant beasts get there, mammoths being native to Eurasia, never Africa (Though Korak did encounter a mammoth, which he named Trompor,  once before in the Gold-Key comics, high in Pal-ul-don's mountain ranges, and also drawn by Manning.)

By the way, Korak, mammoths ARE elephants, just not like the ones native to Africa. 

Perhaps then, this is the explanation of why so many lost cities and realms exist in ERB's Africa. It was perhaps Manning's way of making it seem more credible that so many lost civilizations and a valley full of prehistoric men and beasts could remain undiscovered in the modern world.

What what is the reason for this? And what of the dinosaurs that appeared so unexpectedly? The tylosaurus seemed starving, so could it have come out of a time portal and was lost in the modern world? 

I postulated in a fic once, that perhaps all the lost lands of ERB's Africa were connected, perhaps by an alien intelligance, something like Farmer's crystal tree of time.

But again, if that's true of ERB's Africa, what about that even huger continent, Asia? Burroughs only had one story set there, the Jungle Girl, better known as the Land of Hidden Men. 

It's almost without a doubt that, had ERB set more stories in Asia, many more hidden realms would be uncovered. The there is the lost Viking colony Tarzan finds in North America in the non-canonical Tarzan on the Pricepice. So, no this cannot be a phenomena confined to Africa alone. And then there is the lost Mayan colony in Tarzan and the Castaways, the feudal Japanese culture in The Mucker. There is also all those wired lost realms Korak stumbled upon in his DC comic, while he wondered the earth searching for Merium. That deserves another post, though, as the authors even suggest that Greek goods were real and somehow in control of Korak's fate, and even the inclusion of Circe!

Some More Thoughts Regarding Tarzan's Most Recent Pal-ul-don Adventure (More On Pal-ul-don's Evolution)

 

I left off discussing how in the current online Tarzan adventure, Tarzan does encounter any other other large dinosaur species other than than the gryf. The Manning strips, which I grew up with, had a much great diversity of dinosaurs and giant mammals. 

I believe this is to keep the strip as true to the original as possible, and I doubt there will be any additional dinosaur species (save perhaps if they venture into the swamp region?)

I left off saying that ERB suggested there was a great profusion of unique wildlife in Pal-ul-don, some of the species ancestral forms of African wildlife, others unique strains evolved in islolation. The ja, or spotted lions might have been either. The authors introduce one other such species, a erthystic or red hyena. There might have been beast's like calicotheres and ancient giraffids among others. Who knows?  There is actually a profusion of "living fossils" and unique evolved wildlife here. Pal-ul-don would be a paleontologist's dream come true were it real.

However, what appears lacking as creatures as huge and dramatic as the gryf. The other wildlife would be of interest mainly to experts. 

The ja, jato, and gryf appear to be the only dangerous creatures inhabiting the land. That seems to rule out the other huge, meat-eating beasts that make travel in Caspak or Pellucidar a moment to moment hazard. Where are the huge flying reptiles that are a constant menace in those other lost lands? They don't appear to be native to Pal-ul-don, in spite of the Manning strips, and even the recent novel. Pterosaurs are flying creatures, by the way, and could easily fly over the barrier swamp (perhaps a layer of thick mist might keep winged reptiles from spreading throughout the rest of Africa?).

There was one other dinosaur and/or prehistoric reptile species in the canonical tale, the unidentified swamp saurian, which I've speculated elsewhere sounds very like s suchamimus or baryonyx. And what might have titantic reptilian monsters glimpsed by Tarzan in the swamp (gryfs, swamp saurians, or something else?). Other creatures like possibly a dwarf brontosaurus, as I've read speculated, could also live on there. 

The gryf, however, seems to be the only surviving dinosaur extant on the Pal-ul-don mainland. It is Pal-ul-don's most formidable creature, seeming to rule out similarly spectacular beasts, such as brontosaurus, stegosaurus, and T-rex. 

This a relatively small, isolated valley. In this case, Burroughs offers an example of what a real-life lost world might really be like. It is simply not big enough to hold the profusion of giant fauna found in typical lost realms, such as A C Doyle's Maple White Land, or ERB's own Caspak. Even a large island, could not possibly contain Caspak's teeming, Pellucidar like richness. And the primeval fauna that does survive has been altered over the millinea.

Manning's Pal-ul-don strips, of course, certainly do contain Pellucidar-like richness. Even the the stories (which I intend to actually chronicle here when I get the time!) seem more like Pellucidar tales, in that they involve a series of perils and escapes, while Manning's Pellucidar strips seem to be more about political intrigue, which is a bit more similar to Tarzan the Terrible. 

Then there are the old Dell comic Tarzans, that took Tarzan back to Pal-ul-don thoughout its long run. This seems a far different take on the lost land, and there are many Pellucidaran elements, including the names "thipdar" and "dyal". Just looking at the Dell version, and taking it as a separate timeline, it is posible that THIS version of Pal-ul-don actually connects with Pellucidar, and perhaps the humanoid inhabitants are Pellucidaran colonists. It is, then a portion of Pellucidaran existing on the surface. After all, they appear to lack tails, even though the Ho-don and A-lur are often shown. This might explain the Pellucidaran terms, and perhaps the similarity of the words "gryf" and "gyor" and "garth" and"zarith."

But back to the canonical ERB "universe." 

There is one passage in the novel that suggests cave-painting, depicting what appear to giant saurian-like creatures (correct me if I've wrong about this!). 

Perhaps, then, in the distant past, other giant Mesozoic survivors did inhabit the land. I've speculated in "Evolution in Pal-ul-don", that the lost land as depicted by Manning, which is supposed to exist in a sort of time bubble, and might be continent size, perhaps connecting Africa with South America sometime after the Cretaceous, after most of the dinosaurs died. 

Perhaps, giant dinosaurs and mammals slowly met final extinction as the land shrank, until only the gryf remained, taking its place as the valley's top predator and herbivore. Becoming omnivorous would most certainly be an advantage, since it was less specialize and able to survive on a wide diet of food. 

If large theropods such as the garth existed, they were less adaptable and died out. The Burroughs

Bestiary by David day, however, suggest something more bizarre, however: that the herbivorous ancestors of the gryf might have mated with tyrannosaurs to produce the carnivorous nightmares encountered by Tarzan! It is not feasible, of course, that a ceratopsian could be genetically compatible with a theropod. But, again, this is ERB's universe where stegosaurs can utilize their plates to glide, so who knows? We already know that the jato survived in the same manner by mixing with lions!

There is one other thing that Manning seems to have forgotten in his own stories, which doe not necessarily rule out other giant beasts in Pal-ul-don, but does suggest it. In both the Manning strips and ERB's novel, the Ho-don revere the gryf as almost a creature of supernatural, as it features prominantly in their relgious art. If other similarly spectacular monsters abound, then this seems far less feasible. Perhaps the Ho-don retain ancestral memories of such beasts, but that is long forgotten. If the gryf is the sole surviving mesozoic monster, than the of the Ho-don awe is more feasible, as is the role of the gryf in Ho-don culture. 

Then there is the fact that the Ho-don also use the gryfs as war-beasts, while in the novel, they seem astonished that Tarzan is able to ride on one's back! Somehow, they never learned from the Tor-o-don. Perhaps the Ho-don learned to domesticate the gryf following Tarzan's example, but Manning never explains this. 

The author of Tarzan's Return to Pal-ul-don suggests that a future sequel might also lead Tarzan to other corners of the lost land, where more giant survivors might lurk. But that will need to wait. 

Now on a personal basis, out of the three discussed versions of the lost land, does anyone have a "favorite"?

For me, I'd have to say Manning's, hands down. 

The Dell version's relatively poor artwork, and the fact that they borrow from the rest of Tarzan's Africa plus Pellucidar rule it out. Plus, no tails. The tailed inhabitants are what makes Pal-ul-don unique among lost lands. It's just not Pal-ul-don without the monkey men. 

And the canonical version, as innovative and realistic as it is, the answer is obvious. You just don't get the diversity of large prehistoric fauna.

Manning gives us the best of both worlds. 

J H Rosny's Ironcastle--an Atypical Lost World

 

I just finished re-reading J. H. Rosny's Ironcastle. Rosny is called often the ERB of France, and actually he co-wrote his novels, or some of them, with his brother. I have an old paperback edition, though supposedly a new edition is is soon to be printed that shows more of Roy Krenkel's great art on the cover. The interior illos are all by Krenkel as well, and Phillip Jose Farmer both translated and apparently edited it some, though I have little idea just how much change he may have made. Rosny also authored Quest for Fire and The Great Cat, both novels of cavemen during the Plesticene, and since I haven't read those, I don't know much of his writing save for this, which may in fact contain too much of Farmer's embellishments. 

  Not that that doesn't make a great read. One embellishment that seems almost certain is that Farmer throws in reference to Doc Savage and AC Doyle's Maple White Land. The lost world that Ironcastle and his friends discover in the dark heart of Africa contains no dinosaurs, and in general, no actual prehistoric beasts, save for maybe a huge cave-lion that may be a Plesticene relic. 

There are a species of proto humans called "stunted men" who kidnap the obligatory love interest Murial at one point. There is also one dinosaur relation, a possibly prehistoric crocodilian beast, that is both warm-blooded and furred, with a third eye in the middle of his forehead. The cluster of photo-receptive cells possessed by some lizards and amphibians has developed into an actual eye in this species. The same has happened with a large three-eyed toad, which is also covered in hair (warm-blooded as well?) 

Other creatures inhabiting the land include small birds with fantastic hued, jewel-like colors, preyed on by huge flies, lion-sized leopards with blue-spots, giant, erythistic lions the shade of a red fox, purple and pink hippos four-tusked elephants (gomphotherium, or something else?), among many others. It's a fantastic managerie Rosny gives us. There are also scaled, green-furred sentient beings with cylindric heads. Most of the vegetation is a weird blue or purple, and seems in some strange symbiotic relation with the region's incredible wildlife. 

All this is, as the blurb informs us, this section of Africa has been transformed by an intelligence from the stars. They eventually discover the remnants of a crashed spacecraft, the alien pilot intact, although this being seems to have been neither animal nor plant, but something in between, and the region's weird plant life has "grown" from the deceased alien, and turn, has transformed the native fauna into the fantastic forms that now inhabit the land. Unfortunately, it appears the root system is now dying, which will eventually spell the animal life that depend on it as well. The hidden world may not survive but for a few more months. or perhaps it will revert back into "normal" African species.

It's an engrossing story, and the whole concept of the alien plant that creates and sustains the lost world seems distinctly Farmer-esque. He may be the one who came up with the concept, though I'm unfamiliar with Rosny's other writing. The alien system sort of recalled the "crystal tree of time" in Farmer's Tarzan pastiche The Dark Heart of Time. 

And it kind of begs the question: if there is indeed overlap between ERB's world and this one, could or did Tarzan ever visit Ironcastle's lost realm? Maybe not that we know of. But there was a lost valley that Tarzan discovered back in DC's Tarzan 235, drawn by Kubert, "The Magic Herb." This world also looks like someplace transformed by something from outer space as well. Tarzan battles a creature that resembles one of the giant creodont predators of the Miocene, only with saber-teeth, and then the horned serpent-like beast. And then there are the lizard-like (warm-blooded?) inhabitants. Hmmmm...

Tarzan: the New Adventures

 The All-New Adventures of Tarzan are now available in hardback graphic novel format from (you guessed it) Dark Horse comics. Well, the first two of them are anyway. 

The art for the first story is by Thomas Grindberg, and that for the second is by the Buscema-like Benito Gallego, both of them New Masters in the comic art field today. 

The first story-arc has Jane and Paul D'Arnot plane crash into an unknown region, apparently not too distant from Opar. Tarzan, refusing to believe the death of his mate without proof,  begins his quest, Nkima in tow. The two are briefly misled into thinking Jane is in Opar, where La once again demands Tarzan become her mate siking Ben-Id-Numa (great silver lion) upon him. Tarzan is forced to slay the beast, and several of La's beast-men minions, before continuing his quest. 

Meanwhile Jane and Paul are captured by ancient Greek soldiers and taken to New Illium, where the twin colonies of ancient Sparta and Troy still war. Yes, it's the same grand old tradition Burroughs himself revisited time and again in his novels wherein twin lost cities tribes or races perpetually feuded. 

But the authors insert a difference here to the formula; these are not the descendants of the ancient Trojans and Greeks, but the very same people, apparently knocked out and kept immortalized by a strange subterranean gas in the early days of the colony (a bit reminiscent of Bruce Jones' tale of the  Martian Tara plant regenerating an entire lost civilization in his earlier Dark Horse series). Thus the young beauty who is a dead-ringer for Jane is the ACTUAL and legendary Helen of Troy! There ensues a great adventure in the Burroughsian tradition, that has Tarzan siding with the enemies of Jane's captors, Nkima kidnapped by Bolgoni-Mangani-Oparian hybrids, and Jane turning the tables on Helen of Troy, and assuming her role. All is eventually resolved the heroes depart the land of New Illium with a truce of sorts enacted between the cities. 

Jane was supposed to be a beauty, but who new she was a vertible twin of the fabled Helen? No wonder all the villains of ERB seem to fall for her. 

The next tale begins as a sort of sequel to Tarzan and the Leopard Men, with an apparent revival of the dreaded cult, and one of them seeking Tarzan's death in revenge. It turns out though, that the leopard cult is being used for something even more monstrous and bizarre, that has more connection with  ERB's The Monster Men than the other Tarzan books. There is even a reference to The Island of Dr. Moreau, suggesting that perhaps the worlds of H. G. Wells and ERB co-exist. 

 The third story-arc takes place in Pal-ul-don, and is still going on in the online comic, but it appear it has nearly ended. Tarzan returns to the lost land with Nkima, where he first battles a jato, or saber-tooth lion-tiger over a kill, when both he and the strange feline become mired in quick sand. After helping each other escape, there is a truce between man and beast. While they don't become immediate friends, like in the old Kubert story of Go-Numa and the Black queen (why didn't this happen with Ben-Id-Numa?), and Tarzan and the jato go their separate ways, it is apparent that the two shall meet again, and the incident is not a one-off. Next Tarzan encounters a gryf, and having learned the trick of the Tor-o-don from his previous visited, Tarzan is soon riding on his back. A bit of sequence is also given to ja, the large spotted lions of the valley, as a pride of them drive some young jatos from their kill. The ja is one animal that is somehow rarely seen in Pal-ul-don comics. 

Next they encounter a young girl-warrior of the Waz-ho-don tribe, pursued by a giant -sized Tor-o-don. The gryf slays the huge man-beast, and Tarzan learns that the girl is called In-A, and she is on the run from  Ko-Bar, the Tor-o-don leader who has murdered her parents, outcasts of Pal-ul-don's two major races. and bent on conquering all Pal-ul-don, by first assaulting the captial. Just like in the novel Tarzan's Return to Pal-ul-don, the authors explore the Waz-ho-don race, composed of outcasts of Waz-don and Ho-don, that Burroughs never got around to utilizing as major players. Though Lt. Obergatz, a villain of Tarzan the Terrible, had spent some time among them.  While the warrior in Return was white-skinned with black fur, In-a has skin of a purple or violet shade. Anyway, Ko-bar leads an attack on A-lur, City of Light, and Tarzan is captured, and later forced to fight a huge jato in the arena. 

At this point, remembering an earlier scene, we can easily guess what happens here. And that In-a will finally get revenge. 

It might be useful to point out at this point there are no other dinosaur species here other than the gryf. Somehow, it seemed obvious that this would be the case, almost from the start. They are assuming that this is Tarzan's first return to Pal-ul-don after Tarzan the Terrible, and all those Manning adventures never occurred, and likely won't occur. This is the Pal-ul-don Burroughs invented. Ko-Bar's Tor-o-don army is carried on gryfs, as they should be. There are no garths or hackers. The Ho-don have not managed to train the gryf. One other mammal native to Pal-ul-don gets shown, a species of "red hyena". A red coloration, known scientifically as erythristism, which has been recorded very rarely in leopards, to name one species. 

Burroughs states early on TTT, that Pal-ul-don appears a land where "every known species of bird and beast appears to have taken refuge." The animals Tarzan encounters represent ancestral forms of modern African animals ("forms unaltered for countless millenia") or new strains that have developed when isolated within the small valley. The ja, though I've it assumed to be ancestral, could be either of these. The red hyena, seems a species or subspecies that is uniquely evolved in Pal-ul-don. The stranger beasts that Tarzan was NOT familiar with might be now-extinct creatures like calicotheres or extinct relatives of the giraffe like small sivatheres. 

Gigantic mammals like indrictherium or deinotherium? Probably not. The gryf seems to be the only giant creature, retile or mammal extant on Pal-ul-don's mainland. 

It's a zoologists paradise, but not one overrun by giant reptiles or mammals as it is in the Manning strips. 

We're now onto another topic, and I think only a different post can do it justice. 

And here is a pic from the Karl Shuker website of what a erthyistic or 'red' hyena might actually look like:

You can read the entire article here:

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/search/label/erythrism

Groo meets Tarzan

 Last year, Dark Horse published their Groo meets Tarzan mini series, as a sort of follow-up to their previous Groo meets Conan. The art for the Tarzan parts is again by Thomas Yeates, one of the few comics Greats in the business. The art is wonderful, as always, though I'd be satisfied with a straight Tarzan story, and I'm not that much into Sergio Argones. 

Part of the the comic is devoted to Argones adventures getting to a comic con, with lots of jokes in regard to him being mistaken for the writer of spy vs. spy. 

The Tarzan portion of the tale has Tarzan and Nkima clashing with a group of villainous Arab slavers. Groo and his faithful Rufferto journey through what seems to be Argones version of Africa, where they encounter the Africa of ERB, and the two (or four) of them team to defeat the slavers. 

This tale is spread out over a total of four issues. What's really notable is that the land of Pal-ul-don plays a large role here, but it's largely behind the scenes. Riding on Tantor's back Tarzan and Nkima pass through the lost land in the first issue, and we see two sauropods and a gryf in the background. That's about it though, until the issue four. 

Now you might notice that the picture above seems to promise a plethora of dinosaurs. When I saw it, I reminded myself that it might be misleading, as unfortunately it proved to be. 

There are very few dinosaurs therein, though Tom Yeates makes very good use of those that are. 

Tarzan and Groo don't even reach Pal-ul-don, as the cover suggests. What happens is that Tarzan misleads the slavers into following the wrong path. The villains think they've escaped justice, only to find they're trapped in a dinosaur-infested valley, where they're devoured by a garth (or Pal-ul-donian t-rex). 

Lin Carter's Jandar Books

UPDATE: I got part of this article wrong; Darloona gets kidnapped by the Black Legion and taken captive in her own city at the end of the first novel. She is not taken again by the Sky Pirates until the end of the second. The incidents were similar and I got them mixed up. 

 Linwood Vrooman Carter (1930-1988) was one of my favorite authors growing up. In fact, he may well have been my very favorite during my preteen years. In eighth grade, when I was attending Kesling Junior High (not yet Middle School in those days), I was deep into Burroughs books and Burroughs-type novels, and issues of Ka-Zar and Warlord. Most of these novels were by Lin Carter. Carter bypassed nearly every other author in his rich descriptions of alien worlds, fantastic beasts, and alien landscapes. And to be honest, it was the Jandar of Callisto books that I was immersed in and got me hook on the sword and planet type adventures, not John Carter of Mars. I knew Burroughs' Mars from Micheal Whelan's stunning covers (I figured I was too young to read them), and from the comics of course, and I dreamed of writing my own sword and planet series one day. 

I saw Lin Carter's works on the shelves since I was quite small, but really didn't get to know them. There was a big article by him in Savage Tales featuring Ka-Zar, which my dad bought when I was in lthe first grade, because i wanted any comics with dinosaurs. In it, Carter explained how he crafted the series, and all the ideas that paralelled Burroughs' Martian books. He also hinted at the end, that in the next book, he would write himself into the story!

It was only years later that I got my folks to buy my first LC book, the third in the Zanthodon series, when I was coming of age. Around the same time I found a copy of Black Legion of Callisto at a used book store. I read it and was hooked. This was around the time that the current Ka-Zar series had gone "all-direct", meaning that it was only available by subscription and by dealers and stores who specialized in comics. So of course I subscribed, but still had to go to a comic specialty shop in Indianapolis, and I wouldn't have gotten to go if my dad didn't take me on regular appointments to see the doctor every three months for a serious disorder. 

There, I not only found more comics and back issues than I'd ever imagined, I found the first and third books in the Jandar series. There may have been more, but I couldn't buy everything back then. 

Carter's Jandar of Callisto series is about a Vietnam pilot named Jonathon Andrew Dark who encounters an jade-lined well in the ruins of an ancient Cambodian city. Through some ancient technology, Dark gets transported millions of miles over space to the surface of Callisto, one of the nearly earth-sized moons of Jupiter. He finds immediately that is not the frozen, ice-bound planet one would expect, but a lush tropical world of thick scarlet jungles, populated by tremendous monsters. He runs afoul of one scaled cat-like thing the natives call a yathrib, before being saved by a party of giant insectasoid beings called Yathoon, astride giant four-legged birds of prey known as thaptors. Dark befriends one member of the Yathoon horde named Koja (the equivalent of Tars Tarkas of the ERB's tharks), and manages to escape. He manages to clumsily slay a monstrous "elephant-boar" or vastadon (rather similar to the Basto, native to ERB's Venus), and saves a beautiful alien princess with flaming red hair named Darloona. A planetary romance naturally ensues, before they are both captured by Callisto's sky pirates. These are modeled on the black-skinned pirates of Barsoom, only they have paper-white skin, and the vessels they command are giant airships that look for all the world like winged sixteenth century Spanish galleons. They are given powered flight something Leonardo De Vinchi's ornithopters, and are often called that, and are constructed of paper, soaked in glue to give them their buoancy. The lower chambers of each ship are filled with a helium-like gas. 

Anyway, Jandar (as the natives all him), and Darloona are taken to the pirates' city of the clouds (I forget the exact name of it---Zanadar?), and while Darloona is captive by their leader, Jandar gets tossed into the arena where he battles a gigantic horned and ruffed scarlet saber-tooth tiger-like thing called  a deltagar, and and a horde of alien theropod-like reptiles, later in the series to be revealed as karkadans. 

Anyway, I don't quite recall how Jandar and his girl manage to escape. But they do, and I remember that somehow, at the end, the pirates recapture her, but she calls out to Jandar that she truly loves him!

The next book has Jandar joining the Black Legion of Darloona's native city of Shondakar. He becomes enbroiled in political intrigue, and uncovers a dark plot, instigated by a mysterious man named Ool, who has buttery-yellow skin, unlike the olive shade of most other Thanatorians (Thanator being the native name for Callisto--and you might recall that in the movie Avatar, they named a savage panther-like jungle beast a thanator--coincidence, or had someone read the Callisto books?). Ool turns out be a Mind-Wizard, a race of humans from a different world with physic powers who intend to conquer the planet.

In the third volume, Sky Pirates of Callisto, Jandar and his friends and allies, including Koja the Yathoon set off to rescue Princess Darloona from their city. Dark makes the very foolish mistake here of trusting Ulthar, a captured sky pirate, who throws him off the ship into Callisto's inland sea. Jandar winds up captured by the Parushtarians, a sea-faring race with tomato-red skin. Meanwhile, back on the ornithopter, the demise of Ulthar in this book was particularly memorable. The rogue has also managed to mess up the ship's controls so that they are now on a collision course with giant ice-mountains at Thanator's north pole. 

And herein lies a problem. Thanator's light and heat source supposedly comes from an element in the atmosphere, and acts as both day and night for a planet so far from the sun. How does it work? This is never really explained. Since it does not depend on such proximity, then why should there by ice at the poles? 

Anway, Ulthar manages to hide himself in a secret compartment within the ship. He is sought out and discovered by Tomar, a young lad he'd taken advantage of. The ensuing conflict when Ulthar is about to murder Tomar, when the boy drenches the rogue from burning oil from a lamp, and the villain is hurtled through the compartment window toward the icy landscape below!

Anyway, they manage to reach the city and rescue Jandar and Darloona, and the story ends with the sky-pirate's city being utterly destroyed (something I wouldn't have done). 

The follow-up novel I remember purchasing the first time I went to the Griffon bookstore in South Bend. This is still in business, by the way, though I rarely do there now. They used to have hordes of metal minitures, one of the first stores to specialize in roleplaying games, as well as used sci-fi paperbacks. Anyway, the novel itself has Jandar, Darloona, and their Parushtarian friend whose name I can't remember out on a hunting party seeking herds of vanth; stag-like creatures with seal-like skin. They a pursue a white or albino specimen, which leads them into a trap set by Zamora and her minions, a "mad" ruler of Tharkal, who schemes to conquer all of Thanator. The white vanth, by the way disappears, replaced by a yellow-skinned dwarf, which readers, including myself, recognized at once as another mind-wizard. 

Jandar and his friends are captured and imprisoned in Tharkal's dungeon, where they encounter a small, large-nosed rogue who introduces himself as Glypto, and calls himself a "Chanthan", Thanatorian for something like "gentlemen adventurer." They all assume this is merely self-flattery, but Glypto enables them to escape from Tharkal and capture Zamora in the bargain, aboard a hot air-balloon While attempting to reach Shondakar, they are attacked by a bat-winged Callistan pteranodon (shown on the cover) called a ghastozar. There are two more pterosaur species known to be native to Callisto, the smaller zel (of the forest) and kajazel (of the inland sea). Jandar falls astride the monster and is nearly killed, but all manage to survive, and they set out on foot for Darloona's homeland. At this point, Carter introduces a bizarre vegetable lifeform native to the arid country of Callisto that the natives call the jinko. It is an ambulatory plant that survives dessert regions by crawling on its roots waterhole to waterhole, where it puts down its system and its "leaves" swell up like water-balloons. It also seems to have a rudimentary intelligence (according to Carter) that allows it to sense the presence of pursuers and flee. More realistically, this would probably be caused by turger, or some other manner of perception unique to plants. 

Anyway, they harvest the jinko's bladder-like leaves, and drink their fill, before Jandar's ornithoter appears, and they assume that they are about to be rescued. It turns out that Zamora's minions have managed to capture the vessel, and she is freed and in command once again, while Jandar and company are again her prisoners. By now though, they rightly assume that it is the dwarfish mind-wizard who is manipulating the Empress behind her throne. Upon hearing them discussing this, she bursts in the cabin, furious. Somehow though, Jandar manages to convince her to listen in while they set a trap for the dwarf. The wizard falls for it, and Zamora realizes her predicement: it was Mind Wizards all along who'd setting the Thantorian nations against one another so that they could conquer all! Also, it is revealed that the sniveling but clever little Glypto is no common thief, but that he really is the Chanthan he claimed all along, in disguise.

The next volume, Mind-Wizards of Callisto, has Jandar and company leading a fleet of ornithopters to the mostly unexplored far side of Thanator, where the city of the Mind-Wizards resides. Once they cross into the uncharted regions then they are attacked by a horde of man-like bird-creatures called the Zarkoon. One of their ornithopters is also called the Zarkoon, named after beings the Thanatorians had assumed as mythical as harpies! Jandar and Tomar are captured by the bird-men and imprisoned in a place that looks similar to a bird-cage, where they find another captive, a jungle girl from one of the native tribes named Ylanna. She and Tomar don't get along at first, but after their escape these two eventually become lovers. There follows a battle with a plesiosaur-like aquatic reptile called a groak, and native only to the far side of Callisto (which serves, it turns out, as kind of "lost world" on Thanator), Jandar's party get captured by the Mind Wizards and taken to their city of Kuur. It is one of Jandar's friends (I forget his name) who finishes Jandar's manuscript upon returning to Shondakar, and places in the well, where it will be transported back to earth to be edited and published by LC.

At this point I'll have to make it clear (if I hadn't already) that LC has been pulling an ERB stunt throughout this series, claiming in his intros that he never actually wrote any of these books, that they were sent to him from Cambodia, having materialized across space in the well. Jon Dark is a real man, these adventures are really happening. He even makes the statement at one point that when asked to "write" another book in the series, that it was assumed he was concocting the same manner of good-natured hoax ERB claimed himself when he wrote the Mars and Pellucidar series. But no, he insists, he's only the editor. Most likely Carter never imagined anyone would actually fall for this. Leaving aside all the scientific impossibilities, the books not only parallell ERB's the names and places are all distinctly Carter-esque! In his aforementioned Savage Tales article, LC elaborates on how he created the series, coming up with the place and character names so that readers would be continually reminded of ERB, without straying too close to the original. 

But still, as  Carter explained in later years, that he received very many letters asking the location of well in Cambodia. At last he grew tired of explaining that there was no such well, and just made up some bogus location!

As he had hinted at in that article in Ka-Zar however, in the following book, he took the hoaxing device to an extreme that even ERB himself never dared venture. Yes, the title of Lankar of Callisto, is the Thanatorian version of the author's own name. In it, Carter journeys to Cambodia, and takes the same plunge that his character does. He ends up on Thanator, and where he battles himsefl through the jungles of the Grand Kumala. He befriends an injured othode, a Callistan dog-like creature, huge as a tiger with purple fur and six legs! With goggling eyes, tusk-like teeth, and a frog-like gash for a mouth, the othodes of Callisto (which are more common on the far side), look very like a green callots of Burroughs' Mars. The resemblance is intentional, and Carter even calls Bozo the othode (which he names after his own pet) his own equivalent of Woola, the faithful Barsoomian "hound." LC and Bozo slay a vastodon; then they find and rescue a young Thantorian boy named Taran ensnared in ximchak (giant spider) web, and togather the three make it Shondakar, from which they find Jandar's allies set off for the Mind Wizards' city to rescue him. 

Once Lankar is captured by the Kuurians, he finds himself taken to same cell as Lt. Andrew Dark. Recognizing him at once, he greets him, shockingly, with, "Lt. Jonathon Andrew Dark, I presume!"

This is the point in the story where I actually remember getting a chill while reading it. I don't want anyone reading this to get the idea I thought any of this was real! And yet...

Somehow apprehension caused the hairs on the back of my neck to go up. Or something very like it. 

Andrew Dark begins explaining all he has learned during his captivity of the Mind Wizards' planned invasion of earth. They've about given up on Callisto, he tells Carter. Earth shows much greater promise. By tapping into Dark's brain, they've found that the part the world in which he reached Callisto from is inhabited by yellow men, like themselves, and they could blend into the population faultlessly. All they'd need to do was get control of one man--Mao Tse Tung--and it would all be over for earth. Their plan is to destroy all life on the planet save that need to sustain themselves, as they dominate the planet on as living brains immersed in chemical soup, living an existence of pure intellect. There is already one wizard, Jandar tells him, Quarral No. 5, who is nothing but a living brain aspiring to subjugate whole civilizations. 

And here was LC insisting that all of this was real, not fantastic fiction, and might happening even as I read! But then, I assurred myself that too much time had elapsed from when Carter wrote this, for any alien invasion to have taken place, so the heroes must have succeeded in defeating these would-be conquerors. 

And so they did. Lankar and Jandar escape, kill the Mind-Wizards and their flesh robots (giant soliders created by fusing body parts). The pulsating giant brain, Quarrel No. 5, ends up slain by little Taran, who thinks it some experimental animal the wizards are torturing!

Everyone escapes and all ends well, Jandar returns to Shondakar, Ylanna and Tomar find each other, Lankar returns to earth. Where he soon discovers from another manuscript that Bozo the othode has found a mate, and they now have puppies!

After Lankar, Carter wrote only two more Callisto books, Ylana of Callisto, about the jungle maid of Callisto's far side, and Renegades of Callisto, which introduced the game of Darza, the equivlelent of Barsoomian chess. This was where Carter hemmed a little too close to the source material, as the rules of Darza were virtually the same.

 I don't remember a whole lot from these final volumes, only that cover art was from a different artist, and that the whole cover format was different. In Renegades, Carter also introduced a member of heretofore unknown aquatic race, presumably native to Thanbator's inland sea, the Koram-Laj. One beast also native thereof, called a dragon-fish or dragon-snake, also never featured in any volume. 

Carter seemed to have planned a few more novels, but sales were apparently flagging by this point, and he went on to other things. 

When I started this post I wanted to discuss Carter's other Burroughsian series, especially Zanthodon, and the Venus-like Green Star series. But I didn't figure on getting into this long summary, so that will have to wait until later.