A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS
Cover illustration for Edgar Rice Burroughs
Since I was endeavoring to be the illustrator most faithful to Burroughs' descriptions, Lester del Rey and I had a lengthy discussion about whether the white lizard I wanted to show had six or eight legs. The Barsoomian counterparts to four-legged creatures on Earth always had eight legs, but Burroughs specifically described the white lizard as having only six. We could not decide if this was a mistake, or if Burroughs intended it to have six legs because it had spent its entire life in isolation in the cave. But the author wrote six, so I painted six.
Additional images from A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS
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I don't think Barsoomian creatures always had eight limbs. Calots and banths have ten, thoats have eight, ulsios and white apes have six. I think the primordial worm alluded to in Gods of Mars (said to be the ancestor of the animals of Barsoom) had sixteen. It seemed to me that Burroughs just arbitrarily picked a number greater than four for most of his species.
Your Barsoom paintings have always been the visual truth of the series for me, without question.