John Carter

John Carter
Gender	Male
Species	Human
Age	Unknown (immortal)
Aliases	Dotar Sojat Uncle Jack
Titles	Captain Warlord of Barsoom
Family	Dejah Thoris (wife) Carthoris (son) Tara (daughter) Edgar Rice Burroughs (nephew) Llana (granddaughter) Randolph Carter (grandnephew)

John Carter is an American soldier, who is best known for his adventures on the planet Mars.

Apperance

Carter stands 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) and has close-cropped black hair and steel-grey eyes. He is thought to be immortal; he cannot remember any childhood, and has been a man of about thirty years old for as long as he can remember. Many generations have known him as "Uncle Jack," but he always lived to see them grow old and die, while he remained young.

Carter served as a captain in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, Carter and his companion Powell, who was also a captain in the Civil War, became gold prospectors. Carter and Powell struck it rich by finding gold in Arizona. While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he appears to die; leaving his inanimate body behind, he is mysteriously transported by a form of astral projection to the planet Mars, where he finds himself re-embodied in a form identical to his earthly one. Accustomed to the greater gravity of Earth, he is much stronger and more agile than the natives of Mars due to its lesser gravity.

On Mars, which its natives call Barsoom, Carter encounters both formidable alien creatures resembling the beasts of ancient myth and various humanoids. He finds his true calling in life as a warlord who strives to save the planet's inhabitants. He wins the hand of a Martian princess, Dejah Thoris of Helium, with whom he has two children.

Carter is an excellent sword fighter and has a strong sense of honour. On Barsoom he is also known by the name of Dotar Sojat.

Role in the LoEG-series

John Carter plays a major part in the story Allan and the Sundered Veil, in which, between leaving his body on Earth and his first arrival on Mars, his astral form is first send to an astral plane where he encounters his grand-nephew Randolph Carter, the British adventurer Allan Quatermain, and The Time Traveller. He helps the three men fight off a group of Morlocks. When the time machine of the Time Traveler is broken and the four heroes are stranded in a chrono-crystal aleph, John Carter sees several visions of his own future, including him fighting against Green Martians and meeting Dejah Thoris. Shortly afterwards John Carter's astral form leaves the dreamworld again and continues his journey to Mars.

John Carter also has a prominent role at the start of Volume 2, in which he teams up with lieutenant Gullivar Jones (another Earth man transported to Mars) and several Martian races, including the Green Martians, the Hither People and the Séroni, to fight off a group of aliens known as the Mollusc, that have been terrorizing Mars for several years now. The attack is succesfull and the Mollusc are forced to flee, but John and Gulliver quickly find out the Mollusc are now heading towards a new target; Earth.

Source material

John Carter was created by writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (better known as the creator of Tarzan), and was the lead character in most of his Barsoom novels. However, because the character is not in the public domain in the United Kingdom, the character is only referred to as "John" in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen while his surname is unmentioned, and his American heritage is merely hinted by his phonetic accent. Dejah Thoris is hinted by some allusion to a "princess", presumably deceased, and terms like "Barsoom" are not mentioned.

In their respective source material, John Carter and Randolph Carter are not related since they belong to different authors, though Moore and O'Neill have here assumed John as Randolph's great uncle.