I wrote in an earlier post that I grew up reading the classical Urdu epics. True, but not entirely. I don't want to give the impression that I grew up in a high-brow literary household. Far from it. I collected comics and I read adventure stories. I never cared for the long, turgid novels by Dickens or Dumas. Tried to read them, couldn't and probably never will. I loved the action-packed fantasy novels of John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which I still collect and read. With Dickens, I felt like watching automata going about their clockwork lives. His work never breaks its bounds. Dumas is swash-buckling but boring. Burroughs, in my humble opinion is fantastic. From page 1 of Princess of Mars, I was hooked. In a PC world, Burroughs' text is full of racism, imperialism and the superiority of the fighting white man (Confederate) but you've got to give credit where it's due. He's good. My measure for good is Italo Calvino: in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino lists lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity as the things he values most in stories. Incidentally, he reckons that Dumas has all the ingredients. I reckon that Burroughs has them in spades. My hope is that one day, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (creators of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) will write a graphic novel based on the Princess of Mars. They show what they are capable of in the first chapter of the League, Vol 2 (the Phases of Deimos, to be precise!). If they do it, it'll be a monster.
