My new labor of love site "The John Carter Files" is officially up!

Good ol’ michaeldsellers.com has evolved a site where I spend a lot of my time writing about an object of great passion in my life — the Philppines. I have some other sites “on the side” as well — and last Saturday I came to realize that was time to make another one because it’s becoming clear I’m going to be doing a lot of writing about the upcoming movie John Carter, based the sci-fi adventure books by my beloved childhood author-hero Edgar Rice Burroughs (better known for creating Tarzan of the Apes). One of the great pleasures of my adult life was getting to know Danton Burroughs, the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the “keeper of the flame” of the Burroughs clan (see An Evening with Danton Burroughs) until his tragic death in 2008. Now that the long long wait for John Carter to make it to the screen is over, and the internet trolls are coming out with their knives sharpened, I feel like I have to do my part to defend the Burroughs legacy — hence the new site. Burroughs, you see, was James Cameron’s main inspiration for Avatar and there is an Avatar-John Carter thing going on that needs some attention. (I love them both.)

So on Saturday, it being a non-working day, at least theoretically, I put the site together and I’ve tweaked it a bit since then. The funny thing is, I didn’t even get to the point of announcing it here before it got a pretty hefty series of hits coming from the IMDB message boards for the movie, which are pretty lively and show a wide range of opinion over how the film will do. After having lost the faith briefly, I’m back to feeling that it’s going to be a genuinely good movie — it’s based on material from one of the world’s truly greatest storytellers–and director Andrew Stanton (Wall-E) is demonstrably an extraordinary storyteller himself, as Wall-E showed. And it’s a movie that the fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs have been waiting for since …. well, I’m not sure the movie angle was in anybody’s mind in 1912 when he wrote it, but certainly by the 1930’s they were thinking about it, and it’s been under active development since the 1970’s.

Here’s a look at what the site looks like — you can click on the picture to enlarge, or click here to visit to site. I will occasionally post articles on both this site and the other one — but only those that have some “crossover” appeal, I guess.