They Came From Mars: 12 of the mightiest Martians

• Name: Martians (aka Molluscs, Sarmaks, Uliri)

• Form: Bear-sized giant brains with beaks, tentacles and one ear in their backsides

• Creator: HG Wells, The War of The Worlds

Before HG Wells, most Martians looked essentially like us. After Wells, anything was possible.

In The War of The Worlds, Wells’s resource-starved, monstrous intelligences land in South East England with devastating effect. These are evolved Darwinian nightmares without stomachs or souls who have brought unnamed Martian humanoids along as their living packed lunch. We are next!

They assemble their three-legged war machines and stride across the land dispensing heat rays and poisonous black smoke, reducing London and the suburbs to ruins. Humanity runs like rabbits before them, useful only for their blood and harvested as such. But their risk assessment failed to check Earth viruses…

• Name: Tars Tarkas

• Form: Six-limbed, green-skinned, giant warrior with tusks

• Creator: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars

Every hero needs his best bud and Tars Tarkas has John Carter's back. Tars Tarkas is Jeddak (king) of the Tharks and a cruel, brutal uniter of tribes.

The Tharks are one of the many colour-coded races of Barsoom (Mars). There are giant white apes, symbiotic head and body chessmen and a veritable menagerie of beasts including Zitidars and the eight-legged Thoats ridden by the Tharks.

The ferocious, tribal Tharks live along the dead sea-bottoms of Barsoom and hatch their young from eggs.

Combat defines their long lives, and their loyalty, once earned, is unbreakable. Think Apaches with four arms, radium rifles and a grim outlook on life.

• Name: Dejah Thoris

• Form: Beautiful, red-skinned, egg-laying, fighting princess

• Creator: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars

When Confederate gentleman John Carter first claps eyes on Dejah Thoris, she is a prisoner of the green Tharks and he is immediately smitten both by her beauty and fiercely proud nature: “Her every feature was finest chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black hair.”

Dejah, like just about everybody else on Barsoom, is completely naked except for her jewellery. None of this stops her swinging a mean sword.

Her character has evolved over many years of comic book adaptations and an ill-fated film, to present her both as ferocious warrior and scientific leader of her people.

Together she and John Carter wed and eventually hatch a son and a daughter. Did I mention that they all lay eggs in Barsoom?

• Name: Shambleau

• Form: Red-haired Medusa

• Creator: CL Moore, Weird Tales

Weird Tales was Catherine Lucille Moore’s first sale while working as a bank clerk, and has been anthologised ever since.

When Northwest Smith, Moore’s rangy, inter-galactic gunslinger, claims a mysterious woman from a baying Martian mob he fails to heed their warnings.

This is no ordinary woman but a creature of timeless origins: green cat’s eyes, three-fingered claws, brown-skinned and wearing scarlet leather.

Shambleau's turban comes off at night revealing “a nest of blind, restless, red worms” that enclose her victims in slimy red hair. As their minds are consumed they experience exquisite rapture and repulsion.

Shambleau is shot by Smith using a mirror to avoid her terrible gaze.

• Name: Tweel

• Form: Bird-like creature with a big beak and a giant leap

• Creator: Stanley Weinbaum, A Martian Odyssey

Editor John W. Campbell demanded: “Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man.” Stanley Weinbaum delivered a breakthrough story, populating a 21st-century Mars with strange wonders: self-building, silicon, one-armed pyramid creatures, eight-limbed barrel beasts with midriff eyes and wheelbarrows, tentacled dream beasts luring their victims with psychic projections of desire.

Tweel is saved from this fate by a stranded astronaut and they strike up an unlikely friendship through maths.

Tiny-headed Tweel boasts a flexible beak, brains in its midriff, four-digit hands and feet that allow him to leap 150 feet at a time. Sleeping by sticking his beak in the Martian sand, Tweel also carries a small pouch containing wondrous devices like a glass dart gun.

• Name: Thag

• Form: Giant inter-dimensional carnivorous tree

• Creator: C L Moore, Tree of Life, Weird Tales

“Thag, the terrible. Thag, the omnipotent. Thag, the unescapable. Beware of Thag.”

When Northwest Smith stumbles into ancient Martian temple ruins, he discovers more than he bargained for: an inter-dimensional temple where a priestess cult is busy sacrificing ancient, degenerate, wizened Bush people to Thag.

Thag is a tree-god between worlds and space, whose 12 branches have serpent-like flowers. Thag hypnotises its victims with a siren song, “the dim echo of some cosmic dynamo’s hum”, before consuming their bodies and souls. Northwest Smith shoots its roots.

• Name: Marvin the Martian (aka Commander of Flying Saucer X2)

• Form: The Roman God of Mars with big feet but no mouth

• Creator: Chuck Jones in Haredevil Hare

Quiet and softly spoken, Marvin is not to be messed with. Often accompanied by his dog, K-9, he is capable of unleashing galactic Armageddon.

Like Emperor Ming, Marvin is keen to remove Earth and has spent 2000 years trying to do so – our planet does block his view, after all.

Bugs Bunny found Marvin a tough opponent, while Daffy Duck was reduced to a space schmuck.

You can actually find Marvin on Mars in the form of a special patch on NASA’s Spirit rover. He’s been up there since 2004. Where’s the kaboom?

• Name: The Martian Leader

• Form: Torso-less green head with tentacles in a giant goldfish bowl

• Creator: William Cameron Menzies, Invaders from Mars

William Cameron Menzies, one of Hollywood’s greatest production designers (Things to Come, Gone with the Wind) got a crack at directing this tiny-budgeted B-movie that still lingers in the memory.

Using expressionist set design and a dreamlike structure, Menzies created a phantasmagoric invasion of smalltown America. People were sucked down through sand funnels to be turned into “diabolical instruments of destruction”.

The Martian leader, played by Luce Potter, makes no movements except with its eyes. Completely hairless and with a reptilian hue, this strange being telepathically controls giant, golden-eyed mutants in green onesies.

• Name: The Martians (aka The Devil, Old Hob)

• Form: Desiccated, oversized, green insectoids or giant devil like apparitions

• Creator: Nigel Kneale, BBC Quatermass and the Pit

Quatermass and the Pit is the best Martian movie ever made. Powered by the equally excellent BBC TV series, this is Nigel Kneale’s finest ghost story.

Kneale wove bits of wartime history (V2s), the deep time and evolutionary anxieties of Olaf Stapledon and HG Wells and the latest headlines about racial strife in Britain.

The Martians are long gone but their fossilised remains are sensationally unearthed at Hobbs End tube station. Despite attempts to suppress the news it becomes clear that the Martians visited Earth millions of years ago and monkeyed around with our DNA.

Atavistic memories of the devil are part of our collective Martian unconscious and soon London is torn apart as humanity confronts itself while a giant Martian apparition hovers over the city. We Are the Martians!

• Name: Martians

• Form: Big-brained, green-skinned little horrors

• Creators: Wally Wood and Norman Saunders, Topps Cards

This series of 55 bubblegum cards depicted a wonderfully lurid, gory, invasion of Earth as “Mars Attacks!”

Green-skinned, jar-headed monsters whose exposed brains buzzed with wicked thoughts were sent by their corrupt government to invade our world and save their dying planet. They burned dogs, people and cities before unleashing transformed giant insects to wreak further havoc. Earth eventually got its revenge by invading and nuking Mars.

The cards caused a new moral panic and were banned. But 30 years later, Tim Burton made a bonkers movie out of them.

• Name: The Mysterons

• Form: Invisible global terrorists indicated by mysterious green rings

• Creator: Gerry Anderson, Captain Scarlet

When their city is destroyed during Earth’s first mission to Mars by a trigger happy Captain Black – well it did look like some hastily thrown together lava lamps! – the energy beings that are the Mysterons immediately reconstitute themselves with their physics-defying “retrometabolism”.

In a deep bass voice, they broadcast their collective message of undying revenge upon Earth and claim Captain Black as their agent of destruction.

However their attempts to use Captain Scarlet as their undead operative fail, and it is he, together with his comrades on Cloudbase, who must combat the Mysterons’ unending acts of global terror.

• Name: Ice Warriors (aka Saurian Evolutionaries)

• Form: 8ft green, scaly reptilian warriors with bio-armour

• Creator: Brian Hayles in Dr Who: The Ice Warriors

The Ice Warriors are an ancient, warrior race whose planet is dying.

Capable of intergalactic travel, they are bound by fierce martial codes of obedience and hail from a hereditary caste system.

They love war and beauty and are deeply religious. They bury their dead in ice tombs.

These hulking, slow moving brutes have heavily armoured bodies, helmet-like heads and huge, metallic clamps for hands.

They use a variety of weaponry: sonic guns and grenades, genetically engineered viruses and so-called “aresforming” seeds to transform worlds into cold Martian landscapes.

Heat is their enemy, along with the Doctor. Think hissing Vikings with scales and mega weapons.