![]() Readers of Thrilling Tales (the retro-pulp issue of McSweeney’s that Chabon edited back in 2003) know the first chapter of his sadly unfilmed screenplay “The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance.” Chabon told me he has no intentions of completing the novelization, so his John Carter revisions are the closest we’re going to get. It’s his first film credit since 2004’s Spider-Man 2, the former high mark for superhero excellence (pre- The Dark Knight, of course). Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (who’s always had a thing for Martian scifi) co-wrote the screenplay. And since John Carter is beating Man of Steel to theaters by more than a year, he bounds over Superman in the 21st century too. John Carter’s powers are a product of “the lesser gravitation and lower air pressure on Mars.” A “very earthly and at the same time superhuman leap” carries Carter “fully thirty feet into the air” and lands him “a hundred feet” away.īefore 1912, the 20th century had never seen a hero fling himself through the air before. In 1939, Jerry Siegel offered a “Scientific Explanation for Superman’s Amazing Strength”: “The smaller size of our planet, with its slighter gravity pull, assists Superman’s tremendous muscles in the performance of miraculous feats of strength!”īut Burroughs beat him by more than a quarter century. This Friday Carter takes his first superpowered leap to the big screen. ![]() ![]() He premiered in All-Story magazine a hundred years ago last month. That honor goes to John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pre-Tarzan pulp star. Superman wasn’t the first alien to gain superpowers by hopping planets. ![]()
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