Roger Ebert doesn’t find John Carter unentertaining, just paradoxical. However, it wasn’t so much Ebert’s opinion of the latest sci-fi epic that caught my eye but the reference in the lede:
I don’t see any way to begin a review of “John Carter” without referring to “Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot.” That was a series of little stories that appeared in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1956 to 1973 and had a great influence on my development as a critic. In one of the Feghoot adventures, the hero finds himself on Mars and engaged in bloody swordplay. He is sliced in the leg. Then in the other leg. Then an arm is hacked off. “To hell with this,” Feghoot exclaims, unholstering his ray gun and vaporizing his enemies.
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Then there’s the story of the ERB hero slowiy driving a wagon full of bathroom fixtures through the Martian desert toward the great city of Helium: the real John Carter of Mars.
Make that a one-thoat wagon.
That wasn’t a Ferdinand Feghoot; they all ended with puns. That story, however, did indeed appear in an F&SF, and was about Feghootian length.
Actually, the story he’s thinking of is “The Swordsmen of Varnis” by Clive Jackson, which Appeared in Other Worlds.