I just downloaded a JPEG of the cover of an old Amazing Stories magazine. it shows John Carter (or one of his relatives) standing in the snow, facing down a ghastly yellow beast. Said beast has four legs, two long arms with huge grasping hands, two tusks, and big compound (insect-like) eyes.
Unfortunately, my ref library is out of reach, so I pose the question to you Dopers: What is the name of this creature? I want to say it’s an Ent, but the old memory ain’t what it used to be…
IIRC, sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish Ents from trees. I have no idea what this thing you describe is, though.
I don’t have my books here, but it is the creature from the northern polar wastes, from book 3, “The Warlord of Mars”. These critters had giant compound eyes, and each eye has a little projection that merged into a big horn/mandible.
They slept in big caves underground. IIRC, John Carter snuck through the caves to the city of the yellow-skinned men of the north pole while they were all asleep…except one.
Hmmm…was their name the “Apt?” That has the correct ring…
Sounds like the Great White Ape of Barsoom. These horrid creatures dwell in the many ruined & abandoned cities that dot the former coastlines on Mars’s dried-up ocean beds.
They are carnivourous(sp?) in the extreme, & deadly to the passerby.
::scratching head::
Damned if I remember what those yellow beasties were called; it might have been Apts sure enough. Wasn’t likely to have been Ents, since I believe Ents to have been denizens of the Tolkien world, somewhat tree-like critters IIRC.
Sounds like an apt.
According to John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom, apts are white-furred beasts of the northern polar regions. They have a heqad like a hippopotamus, with a pair of horns gowing downward from the lower jaw. The eyes are large and made of several thousand ocelli each.
Damn, it’s good to have a important reference books at hand.
(BTW, my seven-year-old daughter has just picked up A Princess of Mars. She thinks it is great so far.)
note to self:
preview spelling. HEAD, dammit.
Thanks to everybody who checked in on this one; “Apt” sounds right. The beast on the cover had yellow fur, but I’m willing to dismiss that as artistic license, since a cover of JCoM battling a white animal against a white background is not going to sell very many magazines…
I have all eleven ERB Mars books published as mass-market paperbacks by Del Rey eighteen years ago, and I could have sworn one of the covers featured such a creature…
…and I was right! Check out the cover to the only ERB Mars book that didn’t have “Mars” in the title: Llana of Gathol. Obviously the interpretation by artist Michael Whelan (who did all eleven covers) will be different from that of your magazine cover artist, but it looks like the same basic idea is there. He got around the “white on white” problem by painting from a low-angle perspective, so the animal is framed by the sky instead of snow.
When I get home I can check my copy and verify the name of the beastie.
