Screenwriter/graphic novelist Tom Simmons is a six-decade Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. “I read my first Burroughs novel, Pirates of Venus, at the age of 12 back in the 1960s. I’ve been an avid devotee ever since. I’d always thought it would be great fun to adapt a Burroughs story to the screen or other format, so when the chance came to work with ERB, Inc. on their web comic strips series in mid-2014 I jumped at it. There was never going to be a question about my enthusiasm for the project,” says the Colorado-based writer.

The ERB, Inc. gig resulted from Tom’s long-held love for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as his screenwriting interest. “In 2013, I contacted Jim Sullos regarding the concept of writing a film script for an ERB novel - it was Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, as I recall. Although Jim politely informed me that the license was taken, we stayed in touch and eventually came up with my involvement with the online comic strips project. Things grew from there.”

Working with two creative teams, over the course of the ensuing 12 years Tom adapted both of ERB’s historical novels, The Outlaw of Torn and I Am a Barbarian, to online strip format. In 2022, under license with ERB, Inc. he published the Barbarian strip in printed format. In addition, working under contract with the ERB, Inc. team, in 2019-2021 Tom adapted Burroughs’ “Moon Trilogy” (The Moon Maid, The Moon Men and The Red Hawk) to an eight-part screen miniseries. 

Regarding the stories themselves, Tom admitted to an uncanny sense of being a direct link back to ERB himself as he wrote the adaptations. A student of medieval history, Simmons welcomed the challenge of adapting Burroughs’ 1911 novel The Outlaw of Torn into an online strip. “The story was ERB’s second novel, written between A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes. And it’s the first of only two historical novels he ever wrote. I see parallels between Norman of Torn, who preceded Tarzan by a year, and the iconic ape-man himself. It’s as if ERB is experimenting in order to get things just right.”

In mid-1941, with his own health issues mounting and the world once again at war, Edgar Rice Burroughs penned I Am a Barbarian, his final historical novel. “Barbarian wasn’t published until 1967. The story, set in ancient Rome and involving the mad emperor Caligula, is dark, often X-rated, and decidedly un-Burroughs like. This made adapting it quite a challenge. I wanted to make the story appeal to a wider audience, and I was aided by a new biography of Caligula that paints his personality more in the mold of Joseph Stalin than Jack the Ripper - in his case, a decided improvement," the scriptwriter said. 

<>Asked if he presented “story boards” to the artists when the strips were under development, Simmons gave an interesting answer. “First, I think most writers would say adapting a Burroughs novel to any format can be challenging. He provides so much rich detail in his action sequences that the writer is left to ‘pick and choose’ what can best fit into the limited scope of a strip. Also, there’s often a paucity of dialog, or the dialog comes across as archaic compared to modern speech, so the writer is challenged to either modify it or ‘fill in the blanks’ to make the dialog ring true to the original writer and story setting. Of course, I’m talking about ‘straight’ adaptations here. Some writers choose to take the stories in different directions, recreating rather than adapting. It’s a personal decision every writer must make. My own approach for each episode was to scale down and modify the text, striving to retain as much of ERB’s verbiage as possible, yet to meld it with the series of scenes (panels) I envisioned for each episode. For pacing, I used the writer’s rule: ensure a beginning, middle and end for each weekly strip. I visualized the panels, described what I saw to the artists, and left the rest to them. Mostly, things went well.”

A rather surprising aspect of this kind of storytelling was that Tom never personally met any of his team members. “It would have been nice, but it wasn’t essential to the work. We lived in different parts of the world. Jake Bilbao was from the Philippines, Jamal Walton lived in North Carolina, Lovecraft Award-winning artist Mike Dubisch lived in Mexico and Benito Gallego was from Spain. We used the internet to communicate, and it worked.”

Tom took the less-traveled path on his way to a writing career. “Just out of high school and with a semester of college under my belt, I found I was about to be a dad. My neighbor had just joined the U.S. Coast Guard and said he liked it, so I enlisted.” Six years later, family man Tom received his honorable discharge as a senior petty officer - and rediscovered the need for employment. “My mother worked for Ma Bell and knew someone in the h/r office, so that’s where I applied. Little did I know at the time it would become a 32-year career.” Tom learned computer programming, working with “the big mainframes” the bulk of the time, and also finished work on a university degree in History. But he always harbored a penchant for writing, and hoped one day to have the chance “to launch a new gig, something entirely different.”

In 2009, with the phone company job winding down and his three sons grown and gainfully employed (two of them served enlistments in the U.S. Navy), Tom turned his attention to screenwriting. “I’d had several ideas for film scripts, but hadn’t done anything with them. Next thing I knew, those ideas were turned into films by other people. At that point I knew my concepts were good - so I grabbed Syd Field’s book on screenwriting and Dave Trottier’s Screenwriter’s Bible and taught myself the ropes.” 2010 saw the completion of Crispus Caesar, Tom’s first feature-length film script. Set in the 4th century, the story centers on the eldest son of the first Christian Roman emperor who at the height of his popularity was mysteriously executed on his father’s orders. In 2015, Simmons published a graphic novel e-book he adapted from the film script.

Since that time, Simmons has completed screenplays in the historical, science fiction and horror genres. “I wrote a screenplay in 2016 titled Darling Eddy about the final weeks in the sad, tragically short life of Edgar Allan Poe. In 2020, I completed a TV series pilot about the little-known German army conspiracy to kill Hitler before the 1944 Valkyrie plot titled The Nessus Shirt. I’ve also adapted stories by Robert E. Howard and Robert W. Chambers into screen format, but perhaps my greatest writing challenge is yet to come,” the writer said. “On my writing desk for 2026 is a yet-to-be named project also involving the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and this time it’s something I’ve never done before: a novel.”

Simmons was nominated in five screenwriting categories at the 2010 Action on Film Festival. He lives in Castle Rock, Colorado with his spouse Kim; their three sons and grandson William all live nearby, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.