That's nothing compared to what Kane did to the Giger Alien once...



The first Star Wars was *intended* as an homage to many things, and was not meant to be the clay feet of a monster franchise.

That IS a nice cover. It's a variant for the dynamite series right?

I flipped through Warlord of Mars and Deja Thoris and the art is solid, kinda like Frank Cho's style, but overall it seems kinda boring.
I think I'll just try reading the originals.

Just checked out the newer trailer. Looks a little better. There's some scenes where Deja Thoris looks regal, pretty close to the comics.



my favorite cover.

Put on a long skirt and cover those chicken legs, JC!

I was curious about Kane's Alien screw-up:



Click here and scroll down for the story. Kane thought they wanted an alien, not the Alien.

The story doesn't mention that Nowlan initially refused to re-draw half of the cover until Dunbier offered to pay Nowlan double what he would have been paid to do the entire cover.

The inked cover doesn't translate Kane's faces very well. I have an Alan Moore issue that he did and it wasn't very good. Backgrounds were not existant in some of the stories. However, he was probably really old, so it was still pretty good considering. His western stuff from the same period was excellent though.

Kane's best individual works, IMO, are that final Superman thing he did (which was also John Buscema's last work, I believe) inked by Nowlan, and the Sword of the Atom annual.

I'm not sure why you edited and then took my question out of the context, but my understanding was Lucas couldn't secure the rights to Flash Gordon, and we have that to thank for Star Wars, at least partially. And a cautionary tale to any "creator" who wants to revive a franchise rather than create his or her own. Would the world be better off with yet another version of Flash Gordon or were we better off with Star Wars?

I'm a huge Star Wars fan, but come on, there is so much "homage" going on it's really hard to take it as homage. Sure, there are little bits of homage, that could easily be just homage, if not for the fact that there is nothing else but bigger and bigger collections of homages, and that's if you believe borrowing whole plotlines from Scaramouche and Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" and it's all wrapped up into one huge collections of "homages" to LOTR and DUNE. Not to say LOTR is without it's inspirational sources, but Star Wars, as much fun as it is, is nothing but the sum of other stories parts.

Check out this guys LOTR/SW chart...
http://moongadget.com/origins/lotr.html

Here's the Dune/SW chart again...
http://moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

If your looking for a nice new edition, I got one a little while back. It's a nifty illustrated edition, with the first three novels. "John Carter of Mars: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars" hardcover, from Library of Wonder. Some really great illustrations by Thomas Yeates.

I was never happy with any of the comics. Even the newer ones. They just never seemed to capture the feel or look all that well. Maybe it was just me, or something about the original novels, but I loved Conan and Tarzan comics well enough, they seemed to translate into comics pretty well. Maybe I had higher expectations for the John Carter stuff, for some odd reason.

Where was that from, the old pulp magazines? Or a paperback edition?

I can't seem to remember... how many issues did the Marvel Comics version of Scaramouche run?