I’ve written previously about having a mental movie playing as I’m reading. I was reminded recently of the setting for my mental movie of Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Mars series. It’s based on the Gino D’Achille covers on the Ballantine Books paperbacks where I first started the series.
The D’Achille gallery above comes from The Art of Barsoom blog. It shows what a great job D’Achille did with those covers. Too bad you don’t see the full, wrap-around image for each.
But that website isn’t what got me thinking about the Mars covers. It was seeing The Golden Age‘s recently gallery of covers and artwork from early hardback reprints of the series.
While I appreciate and like the older depictions mostly by J. Allen St. John and John Coleman Burroughs on display there, they seem from another, long-ago time, and a different Barsoom from what I visualize.
I’m sure if you first saw the illustrations in the pulps or later hardback reprints, that might be what you picture in your mind.
But for me, it’s the colorful paintings by D’Achille. How about you?
Those were the editions of John Carter I got into as a kid back in the late 70s. So these, along with the DC & Marvel comic versions were how I visualized Mars.
I always thought Leigh Brackett had the richest and most vivid prose descriptions of “our” Mars.
Hard to say exactly who’s the ‘perfect’ visualization of ERB’s Barsoom, because each seems to have built on the work of earlier illustrators. I didn’t have much exposure to the original pulp and hardcover book covers and illustrations of the 1910s-1950s, or even Ballantine’s original paperback releases. I was blown away by Frazetta’s unauthorized Ace editions of the early 1960s when I finally discovered them.The first time I read them though, it was D’Achille’s Ballantine paperbacks from the 1970s. Nevertheless, I bought them all over again with Frazetta’s later covers for the SF Book Club hardcover editions of the 1980s, and yet a third time when Michael Whelan reimagined them for Del Rey. Continuing in the same tradition, the latest of the greats to me is Joe Jusko, who illustrated ERB for a trading card set, art book, and most recently for covers of Dynamite Entertainment’s WARLORD OF MARS comic book.