The Mucker and its sequel, Return of the Mucker, are E.R. Burroughs novels about the kind of guy who might be a third-class mook in some of his other novels. The Mucker is a thug from Chicago with no talents, no prospects, no education, and no morals.
Somehow he develops all of these after fighting degenerated headhunter samurai after being shipwrecked on a Pacific island along with a parcel of high society dudes including a beautiful and nervy girl who is good with a wakizashi. (Not making that up.)
The Return of the Mucker switches genres to Western, but I never got ahold of it to finish.
Riders of Skaith 
I have to admit, I gave up on Burroughs after the 4th or 5th Barsoom novel.
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A Fighting Man of Mars is where I tapped out on the Barsoom books, too, but I used to *love* the Tarzan books.
Still do, but now they’re a bit harder to take seriously now.
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How does Burroughs writing compare to the Shadow stuff, since it is all pulp?
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Different genres. Burroughs writes fantasy-adventure pulp. Gibson writes detective-mystery pulp. Burroughs has a very distinctive voice (although Leigh Brackett’s stuff sounds quite similar to my reading-ear, especially her planetary romance): it’s more sciffy and very masculine, even when he’s writing women….and mentioning Brackett is kind of weird, since Brackett did do hardboiled noir, too. Gibson sounds like someone who was writing too fast to bother with all the stylizations of noir-proper/ hardboiled jargony stuff, but that’s the world he’s writing in and for. Burroughs’ heroes inhabit a world that is similar but rather more fantastic than ours. Gibson’s is more specific to place and time.
Does that make sense?
I may have to think about this some more.
I wonder what Lamont Cranston and Lord Greystoke would have to say to each other….?
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That does make sense and it makes me feel better about the Shadow.
You should think about writing up a post on this idea. It seems like you have some ideas ready to go…
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I’m just going to steer clear of any Freudian interpretation of the imagery here. But that’s a whole lot of something going on.
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….Uh….
Pretty sure he’s just choking out the dude to get his gun and his horse.
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I was thinking of the poor horse. And the saddle horn seems to be making a point.
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Yeah, horses rarely get treated well in fiction. Or illustration.
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