A trip to the Moon

Well, this is the third time I've tried to write this post, the first two attempts spiraled into the political domain, but I'm not sure that anything can be written on Burroughs Moon trilogy without at least touching the political realm as all three books in the trilogy deal heavily with communism and religion. To avoid voicing my personal opinions on politics I will try to avoid the second and third books in the trilogy, The Moon Men and The Red Hawk, and focus on the first book in the series, The Moon Maid.

The Moon Maid deals heavily with religion and reincarnation, and the story begins with “Julian” relating the story of his ancestor, the hero of the tale, Julian the 5th of the International Peace Fleet and his accidental voyage to the moon. To quickly sum up the beginning of the story, the earth launches a ship, the Barsoom, in the hopes of visiting mars, however, before they can pass the moon a rival of Julian the 5th, one Lieutenant Commander Orthis, sabotages the ship forcing the crew to make an emergency landing on the moon. In the process of landing the ship is caught in a “lunar whirlpool” and sucked into a crater and find that the interior of the moon is hollow and capable of supporting life. On investigating the crew encounters the first of the Lunar races, the Va-gas.

The Va-gas are interesting, they are semi quadrupedal carnivorous “horse” men. Burroughs describes them as four limbed with long thick necks and travailing on four legs but fighting while standing bipedally. The description that Burroughs gives is very difficult for most artists to render, most of them depicting them much like centaurs. J Allen St. John was the first artist to depict the Va-gas, even he shows them as centaur like beings; the inaccurate artistic depiction of the Va-gas may in fact be due to the way J Allen St. John originally painted them. I decided to try and depict them a bit closer to Burroughs description.

While this is closer to Burroughs description it's still not accurate, it is exceedingly difficult to depict the Va-gas the way Burroughs describes them. When I draw a primitive or exotic race I prefer to do a lot of research to establish an overall look for the race. Barring access to research material I tend to fall back on what I know, for the Va-gas I used the eastern woodland Indians as a starting point and added a bit of fantasy to spice it up.

This one is a bit closer to the description, I tried to follow Burroughs anatomical description as closely as possible on this sketch, but in all honesty his description doesn't work. I found that if Burroughs description is followed to the letter what you wind up with is a creature that looses it's edge of fear, or intimidation, and winds up just being ridiculous.

I posted some small Kalkar head sketches recently, but as I was digging through some old sketchbooks I found this guy

This version of the Kalkar is more appropriate for the second book in the series, The Moon Men, but it seems to be the only Kalkar drawing I've done that is more than a simple head sketch.

Julian the 5th, the hero of The Moon Maid, is a standard Burroughs hero, young and strong with a solid code of ethics and a lack of fear that edges on suicidal ideation. Near the middle of the book Julian is captured by the Kalkars and taken to Kalkar City No. 337 and imprisoned within. Julian is a Burroughs hero, so no prison can hold him. He escapes from the Kalkars and makes his way to the city of Laythe where he becomes Ju-lan-fit'

I had some symmetry issues with this picture, all around it was a bitch to draw, which is probably the reason I didn't finish it, but it came out pretty well; it did remind me of why I don't do more backgrounds though.

The Moon Maid doesn't really have an ending, it just kind of stops. This was a technique that Burroughs used many times and in most cases it's obvious that the story/book was written either as a prologue or with the intent of continuing the story as a series. There are some cases however, like in A Princess of Mars, where it just seems like he couldn't figure out how to end the book. The Moon Maid was intentionally written as a prologue to The Moon Men. The Moon Men was originally a written as a piece of political fiction titled Under the Red Flag, it was written in 1919 shortly before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. It was Burroughs outcry against the communism that the west was allowing, and in some cases encouraging, to take hold in Russia. Burroughs publisher refused to publish Under the Red Flag, this was apparently due to the publisher not liking some of the statements that Burroughs made in the book, but Burroughs intended to have the book published one way or the other and made the decision to rewrite it. He turned it into a Sci-Fi novel by changing the Bolshevik antagonists into the Kalkars and moving the setting from Russia to the U.S. It seems that the changes to the story required a more in depth lead in than could be accomplished by simply adding a chapter, so The Moon Maid was born.