MONSTERS VS. VILLAINS

 Though I've made distinctions elsewhere on the blog as to the theoretical nature of monsters and villains in terms of the goal-affects "persistence" and "glory," here I'll confine myself to one quick observation, building off the following quote:

"Why, this fellow seems to take a diabolical--I might almost say pathological-- pleasure in crimes of violence, revenge, avarice and self- protection. Sometimes it seems as if he delights in the pure deviltry of the thing. It is weird."

The "fellow" in question will later be revealed as The Clutching Hand, a nemesis to Arthur B. Reeve's hero Craig Kennedy in both the 1914 silent serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE and the identically-titled movie novelization (which ran in 1914 magazines to promote the serial). Though Reeve was the sole creator of Craig Kennedy, in all likelihood he was a hired gun in working on the serial, whose narrative would have been controlled by the producers, principally George B. Seitz, also a director and writer on the serial. The Clutching Hand may not be the first costumed villain in literary history, but he has been credited as being the first in narrative cinema, for whatever that's worth.

The full serial is not extant, but the Reeve novel is. I haven't yet decided to read the book online, but that opening line struck me as very indicative of the appeal of villains. While there are villains who have tragic backstories, they're usually not as tragically-oriented as monsters. One thinks of the Frankenstein Monster arising, a tabula rasa in a grotesque form, only to find himself an instant pariah, or the Browning version of Dracula, vaguely yearning for a proper death. Stoker's Dracula is more the cold-hearted plotter, but I see in him none of the glorious elan one sees in super-villains like the Hand. Dracula doesn't leave mocking notes about his lawbreaking ways, much like a later breed of villain who obligingly leave clues to their virtuous opponents. Not dissimilarly, Fu Manchu has his own way of "signing" his murders, and in the first novel Nayland Smith remarks on how Fu won't lower himself to use mundane weapons but always has to use more exotic devices.

More on these matters as they occur to me.                   

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4

 At the end of Part 3 I wrote: "Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives."  

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band as support-characters to Ivanhoe, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.   

Serial-works, whether by one author or several authors, have the ability to evolve over time, which means that the status of icons may change in many ways in terms of both forms of escalation. Serials that possess an ensemble of Prime icons need not be as inflexible as those with a solo protagonist; a character in the ensemble may be killed for any number of reasons without affecting the longevity of the series. If anything, the termination of the character Thunderbird during the early issues of "The New X-Men" probably benefitted the series in terms of making the other characters seem more at-risk. Yet because Thunderbird appeared in two ensemble-stories before he was killed, he possesses ELEVATED ICONICITY-- an elevation due entirely to quantitative escalation in his case.         

I've mentioned earlier that the prose icon of Fu Manchu possesses durability born of both qualitative and quantitative escalation. The first cinematic adaptation of the character in film's sound era, though, possesses only the quantitative type, consisting of just three rather cheap films from Paramount Films in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Moreover, in the third and last film, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu is slain early in the movie, because the script downgrades him to support-status in order to make his daughter Ling Moy the Prime icon of this installment of the series. I doubt that this people behind this low-budget series planned for any more appearances for Ling Moy when they began the project; they were probably simply told to play up Fu Manchu's daughter because Rohmer's book DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU was being sold around the same time. As the star of a single film, Ling Moy would, like Ivanhoe, possess only BASAL ICONICITY. However, she like Ivanhoe would still possess stature, rather than charisma, even though Ling Moy was just a knockoff of Fah Lo Suee, a character who in the Rohmer books was only a charisma-type, and who never became a cultural touchstone as her prose-father did.

The distinction between base and elevated forms of iconicity is particularly important in serials wherein Sub icons make repeated appearances. Almost none of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories contain "repeat offenders" among Holmes' foes, and the celebrated Professor Moriarty only escapes sharing the lowly basal status of Stapleton and Grimesby Roylott by having full appearances in two Doyle stories-- even though one of them is a prequel to the story in which Moriarty appears to bite the big one. Other prose serials toyed with bringing back favorite villains to oppose series-heroes, though it would seem that no one exploited "elevated iconicity" for Sub icons as thoroughly as did Golden Age comic books.      

A Sub icon who appears only once can only possess Basal Iconicity with respect to quantitative escalation but may take on greater durability in terms of qualitative analysis. The Death-Man, who made his only appearance in BATMAN #180 (1966), was never meant by his creator to have any future appearances, and indeed he's only been "bought back" in a couple of later iterations that may not be identical with the original evildoer. Most Bat-fans did not want to see Death-Man keep returning like Joker and Penguin, because Death-Man's only schtick was that of making himself appear to have died-- something he only did so to cheat the executioner. The single "Death-Man" story also does not give him more than basal iconicity, but he does have durability in Batfan-circles because of the perceived high quality of the story.      

The rule of "one doesn't count but two does" can be illustrated with two other Bat-foes, but from the '66 teleseries. In one episode, "The Sandman Cometh," Michael Rennie makes his only appearance as master crook Sandman. This episode counts as a "villain-mashup" since Sandman teams up with Catwoman, a high-charisma "repeat offender" in the comics and one who'd been the main Bat-enemy in three previous episodes. But because Sandman possesses only basal iconicity, it's not a "villain-crossover." 

However, though Sandman is not more than an average one-shot villain-- not nearly as good as either False Face or Chandell-- he gets outscored in terms of iconicity by two-timer Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. She like Sandman first appears in the company of an established Bat-foe-- though Vincent Price's Egghead had only made one previous appearance-- and if she'd never appeared again, she would have stayed at the basal level. But the "Olga-Egghead" team made one more appearance, and so she earns the "elevated" level. (And since I brought up qualitative analysis before, Olga's maybe a little better than Sandman, but not anywhere as bad as Anne Baxter's previous one-shot evildoer, Zelda the Great.)      

More on these matters as they occur to me. 

       

THE READING RHEUM: THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES (1936)

 

Though I'm a fan of (and maybe an apologist for) Sax Rohmer's works, I'd never visited either of the two "Yellow Peril pulps" produced by Popular Publications. In 1935 Popular launched THE MYSTERIOUS WU FANG, and the magazine lasted into 1936 for a total of seven issues. Popular pulled the FANG (sorry) and almost immediately issued another Yellow Peril series, DOCTOR YEN SIN. But the SIN came to an end that same year after just three issues. An essay on Pulp.Net alleges that Sax Rohmer's lawyers may have sent Popular a letter of restraint for both serials, claiming that the pulp publisher was stepping on the Fu Manchu brand.

It should be kept in mind that Rohmer's Devil Doctor was doing pretty well in the 1930s. Rohmer revived the Fu series in 1931 and prior to the publication of WU FANG, the British author had produced the seventh in the series, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, which first saw serialization in 1934 within the "slick" upscale magazine COLLIER'S. I've no information about how well either FANG or SIN sold, but if FANG had been selling badly, why bring in a second Asian villain to take his place? One Wiki quote asserts that SIN might have been less "juvenile" than FANG, but without reading the source material I can only note in passing that FANG's heroic opponents included one teenaged boy, whereas there are no juvenile characters in the third and last SIN novel, MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES.

Arguably the title is the best thing about the story. Like a lot of pulp titles, the creator seems to be jamming together disparate subjects to make the reader curious enough to wonder, "How the heck can mummies sing?" The explanation for the phenomenon that causes living human beings into mummified creatures, and the auditory sound associated with the phenomenon, is pretty inventive.

Not so much the title character. Author Donald Keyhoe (best known today for UFOlogy books) copies all the dominant surface characteristics of Fu Manchu. He's a polymath who can speak several languages, can master all of the sciences, and can hypnotize almost anyone. According to an article by a Wold Newton writer, the other two issues don't seem to have given Yen Sin any background at all, and he barely has any character beyond being an Asian mastermind. He commands a criminal organization called the "Invisible Empire" (though the cover uses the term "Invisible Peril").Which begs the question-- how "invisible" can your empire be when most of your henchmen are savage "Yellow" brutes, who might find it hard to blend into even a big metropolis in the US.

Possibly Yen Sin gets short shrift because Keyhoe put his greatest effort into the doctor's opponent Michael Traile, "the Man Who Never Sleeps." Due to a failed brain operation, Traile loses the capacity to sleep normally. Only a special yoga technique of relaxation allows Traile to keep from going mad, and not sleeping makes him something of a polymath who fills the late hours with esoteric studies. That said, he's just as flat a character as Yen Sin, and so are all of the supporting characters.       

Keyhoe certainly does not stint on the action; everywhere Traile goes he gets into some running gun-battle. But his crisp prose is somewhat mechanical. I wasn't expecting any of the moodiness of Sax Rohmer here, but I also didn't get the sort of fervid verbal poetry one finds in the purple pen of Norvell "The Spider" Page. In true Fu Manchu fashion Yen Sin gets away in the pages of his final adventure, though probably Keyhoe wrote the story long in advance of the decision to cancel the magazine.

The pulps also had a genius for capturing the uncensored attitudes of the writers and the readers at whom they aimed. But there are no insights here about why there's an eternal race war between Occidental and Oriental-- though Yen Sin's only moment of individuality Yen Sin is a claim that he hates the Japanese as much as the Caucasians. Japanese fifth-columnists play a minor role in MUMMIES, and there are nodding references to the activities of the Axis powers. For what it's worth MUMMIES' antipathy to Germany and Japan is one of the earliest expressions of anti-Axis feeling I've come across in American pop culture. I wasn't really expecting anything on a par with the best of Sax Rohmer, and in a way I'm kind of glad that he's not as easy to emulate as a lot of critics might suppose.                          

INFLUENCE OF ANXIETY

 Response designed for a forum-post, context implicit.

____________

Because you and another poster raised the spectre of influence between the daughter of Sax Rohmer"s Fu Manchu (1912) and the daughter of Ming in FLASH GORDON of Alex Raymond (and all uncredited collaborators), here are my hot takes.

First off, there's no doubt in my mind that Ming derives from Fu Manchu, even though their specific characters are not very similar. The fact that both have disobedient daughters is one big factor, though surprisingly the big thing everyone knows about Princess Aura-- that she falls big-time for studly Flash Gordon-- is not initially a feature of Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee.   

Now, the element of a female ally of Fu Manchu falling for one of the heroes is a big part of the first two books, published respectively in 1912 and 1916. Fu's beautiful slave-girl Karameneh inexplicably becomes enamored of Doctor Petrie, and thus helps Petrie and his cop-friend Smith out of some jams. In the second book Karameneh even shoots her master to save Petrie, and the only thing that saves her from the devil-doctor's vengeance is that Fu uses his former servant as a bargaining chip to compel Petrie's aid in the third book.

This book, HAND OF FU MANCHU (1917) also introduces Fu's daughter, though she's not given a proper name and is never disobedient to her father's will. Then there's a lacunae of about fourteen years, during which there are no official Fu Manchu novels (though the doctor kind of "guest-stars" in THE GOLDEN SCORPION). DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU debuts in 1931, and here Fah Suee does get a name, and she does seek to wrest control of the Si-Fan from her father. However, she doesn't ally herself to any Englishman. In this and in the subsequent book, she implicitly uses drugs to make a young guy her lover, though there's no sense that she's in love with him.         

The sixth book, BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, again portrays conflict between father and daughter, though not over any romantic alliance of hers. Then finally, in April 1934, Rohmer starts serializing, in Collier's, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, Fah stuns her dad by claiming that she's fallen in love with Fu's worst enemy, Smith. In two or three later books, this romance is mentioned, and at least once Fah helps the heroes out of a fix, but the plot is left hanging by the end of the series.

However, FLASH GORDON debuts in January 1934 and its first arc, in which Aura meets and desires Flash Gordon (even as Ming desires Dale Arden) finishes up in April-- which as noted is pretty much when TRAIL got started.

Of course, Raymond et al could have taken the element of the romantically traitorous daughter from a lot of places other than Rohmer. But Rohmer did use that element, albeit with a slave-girl rather than a literal relation, for whatever that might be worth.  

    

THE READING RHEUM: THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU (1987)

Before his passing, Cay Van Ash published this sequel to his Fu Manchu pastiche TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET. Van Ash began work on a second sequel but whatever rough draft he may have completed was lost after his death.

In my review of BAKER, I mentioned how Van Ash had interpolated that narrative into a time-frame of a few months between chapters in the Rohmer book HAND OF FU MANCHU. Van Ash's prologue-- in which he claims to be recapitulating the notes of Doctor Petrie for the adventure that follows-- insinuates that the remaining chapters of HAND, which conclude with Fu's apparent death at sea, also took place in 1914, rather than at the book's publication date of 1917. But 1917, when World War One has been grinding on for three years, is the timeline for FIRES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, Nayland Smith, who's usually a police commissioner with broad powers to pursue Fu Manchu, is inducted into the British army, and then sent to Cairo when there's news of new Devil-Doctor activity. By a fortunate coincidence, Smith's sidekick Doctor Petrie moved his practice to Cairo with his wife Karameneh, whom he liberated from Fu Manchu in HAND. However, before the novel even starts, Smith wires Petrie to send his wife away from their home, on the chance that the Doctor may reach out to harm his former slave. (Arguably, the real reason Karameneh is gone from the whole book is so that Petrie will get the chance to interact with three different beauties while the wife's away.)

The story commences by introducing Fu's new weapon, the super-scientific "fires" of the title, though arguably that device fades in importance of other concerns. Fu comes to Cairo looking for a renegade German scientist who has his own super-weapon-- and it doesn't take a lot of figuring to anticipate that this one is based in real science. However, Fu doesn't have a wealth of resources after all the defeats he suffered in 1914. He has some Arab allies and what appears to be some sort of animal-human hybrid, sort of a "rhino-man," which I guess anticipates the artificial humanoid seen in 1948's SHADOW OF FU MANCHU. In addition, Fu is also served by both of the femmes fatales from HAND, the cruel temptress Zarmi and the incomparable Fah Lo Suee.

The third "beauty" I referenced is one Greba Eltham. This minor character appeared in Rohmer's 1916 RETURN OF DR FU MANCHU, and Van Ash clearly cast her as Petrie's nurse-assistant in order to give Petrie more feminine problems, given that Greba's clearly in love with the physician. Greba ultimately finds true love elsewhere, but she gets into a cat-spat with none other than Fah Lo Suee. Rohmer never intimated that his version of Fah had any interest in Petrie, and arguably even her affection for Smith isn't established until late in the series. True, Fah doesn't love Petrie. She tries to seduce him early in the novel for the purpose of getting information, but after doing so, seems to consider that she's "staked out a claim" on him. Oddly, though, it's the hellcat Zarmi-- who like Greba only appeared in one Rohmer novel-- who *may* get further than first base with married man Petrie, according to a speculative footnote by Van Ash. Fah Lo Suee gets more scenes than the other two females, though I felt Van Ash's interpretation of her lacked some je ne sais qua.

As for the Devil-Doctor, he gets two speaking-scenes near the novel's beginning and at the end. While FIRES is just a good formula thriller with no deeper resonance, Van Ash is almost the only author who managed to duplicate the way Rohmer had the character speak, with a combination of dispassionate cruelty, sagacity, and an odd capacity for mercy. Only one film came close to the fascinating Fu-speech pattern, the serial DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, and none of the comic book iterations were any good on that score. Fu naturally appears to "die" again at novel's end. Rohmer never gave a diegetic reason as to why the Doctor went out of circulation between the years 1917 (not counting a flashback cameo appearance in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION) and 1928 (which is the year in which Van Ash's prologue claims the Doctor returned). FIRES was not that novel, but perhaps there's some chance it may still be written by someone, someday.

THE READING RHEUM: TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET (1984)

 

Over a decade after Cay Van Ash, former secretary to Sax Rohmer, completed the only book-length Rohmer biography, he published this work, a major crossover of the iconic figures of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. 

The title, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, clearly spotlights the superior fame of the Great Detective, who had remained immensely popular through numerous film, TV and prose pastiches, while the Devil-Doctor had his notoriety stoked only by a handful of films and a Marvel comic book. But there was a substantial connection between the two characters, even though Holmes had debuted roughly 25 years before Fu. When Rohmer began the Fu Manchu series around 1912, the first stories emulated the pattern of almost all of Doyle's Holmes stories, in that the stories were "told" to the reader by the assistant of a heroic crusader, a sidekick who purports to be narrating real exploits. Thus, where Holmes had Doctor Watson, Nayland Smith (main opponent of Fu Manchu) had Doctor Petrie. Given Sherlock's immense popularity in the Victorian era and beyond, there's little to no chance that Rohmer wasn't sedulously imitating Doyle's narrative formula, though after the first few novels other characters take Petrie's place, simply telling the story of their involvement in a given adventure, with no pretense of "recording adventures."

Speaking of the recorder-pretense, Author Van Ash claims that both this book and its only sequel (to be reviewed separately) were compiled by him from notes left behind by the fictional Doctor Petrie in the years before the character's role as amaneunses was usurped. Van Ash in his "fictional" role even makes the interesting claim that unlike Doctor Watson-- who claimed that the final Holmes adventure occurred in 1914, in the months before World War Two broke out-- Doctor Petrie never dated anything he wrote. This conceit allows Van Ash to imagine a story interpolated between the histories of Doyle and Rohmer's characters. According to Van Ash, BAKER takes place during the months in which the Great Detective is completing "his last bow," that of completing a massive espionage plot against England's enemies. This has a salubrious effect of not contradicting Doyle as to Holmes' final exploit. And even though Rohmer's HAND OF FU MANCHU was published in book form in 1917-- the same year Doyle published "His Last Bow"-- Van Ash fudges the dates in the Rohmer work, claiming that this story also transpires in 1914. Indeed, the whole of BAKER takes place over the course of a few months between Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of HAND. 

All this fine attention to dating-detail would of course be wasted if the author had not managed to get the best out of having two titanic popular-fiction icons cross paths. Happily I can "record" that Van Ash accomplished this aim. Without going into an extensive contrast of the literary legacies of Doyle and Rohmer, I'll generalize that Doyle's detective stories, even with their use of blood-and-thunder, often emphasize what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart." By contrast, most of Sax Rohmer's thrillers, though they often appeared in high-prestige "slick" magazines, are more pulpish and extravagant in tone and content. Amazingly, Van Ash manages to blend the two approaches.

So, the plot. In 1914, Nayland Smith disappears, and it's clear to Doctor Petrie that the agents of Fu Manchu committed the deed. Lacking any leads, and not being a detective himself, Petrie just happens to have met John Watson at a medical conference, and so imposes on Watson to write an introduction to Holmes. Petrie meets Holmes, who has officially retired from the profession of consulting detective, but who as noted earlier is still covertly pursuing his espionage aim. However, Si-Fan agents learn of the meeting. One of them, fearing that Holmes will ally himself to Petrie, tries to kill Holmes but murders one of the detective's servants. Thus Holmes comes out of retirement to avenge the man's death, teaming up with Petrie to track down Nayland Smith-- which inevitably leads to the uncovering of Fu Manchu's latest scheme to cripple Western Europe.

I distinguished between "tone" and "content" above. The content of BAKER is indisputably that of Rohmer, as Petrie and Holmes chart a peripatetic course, exposing various Fu-crimes, often following the "rational Gothic" pattern in which supernatural-seeming events are explained by some quick of improbable "science." But Van Ash infuses the novel with the humanitarian (if still melodramatic) tone of Conan Doyle's stories. I haven't read every Rohmer story, but I would be surprised to find one in which any of that author's heroes empathize with societal underdogs, as Holmes and Petrie empathize with the short, nasty lives of Welsh coal-miners. Rohmer just didn't put those sort of humanistic touches into his stories.

Van Ash pays just as much close attention to place as he does to time. Every setting comes alive so well, I would find it hard to believe that Van Ash himself didn't visit the locations described. And he does a good job of playing Holmes off Petrie, in that the two of them have never worked together and are more accustomed to their own respective partners. 

But again, all of the lesser challenges faced by the two heroes would have been for naught, if Van Ash failed to deliver on his "clash of titans." In keeping with the Rohmer books, Fu Manchu rarely appears "on stage," which serves to increase the sense of his omnipotence-- though Van Ash pays more attention than did Rohmer to the limitations of the Devil-Doctor's resources. For that matter, Holmes himself excuses himself from the investigation, but it's only so that he can don a disguise, BASKERVILLES-style, and pull a fast one on both Petrie and their opponents. There's only one face-to-face encouiiter between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, but it's a small masterpiece. The two are of course aware of each others' stellar reputations, and Fu Manchu-- who has not yet found his "fountain of youth"-- expresses regret that Holmes is too old to be of service to the Si-Fan, or else he Fu would be happy to turn Holmes into one of his brainwashed slaves.

Van Ash also brings in Petrie's future wife, the Egyptian slave-girl Karameneh, who I believe gets liberated from her servitude to the Doctor in the later chapters of HAND OF FU MANCHU. Amusingly, because all the events of BAKER take place just before Chapter 30 of HAND, there are no references in Van Ash's book to Fah Lo Suee, because Petrie has his first fleeting encounter with the daughter of Fu Manchu-- in Chapter 30 of HAND!

For all the uses of "uncanny science" to explain Fu's various enterprises, Van Ash climaxes with a dynamite example of Devil-Doctor super-science (essentially, one of the many "death rays" that became popular in early 20th century pop fiction). Holmes contributes a crucial effort to foiling Fu and then returns to finish out his last adventure a la Doyle-- while the Manchurian mastermind is just getting started on his long career of venerable villainy.

In closing I'll note that Van Ash also responds to critics who correctly pointed out that Sax Rohmer knew next to nothing about Chinese culture when he created Fu Manchu. In compensation, Van Ash has his heroes interview a prominent Sinologist, who works out some enthralling ideas as to how Fu Manchu came to be, without contradicting any of the intriguing hints Rohmer himself provided.

And so the curtain falls upon this meeting of literary masterworks. I'll probably briefly revive my old blog-project, THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, just long enough to append BAKER to that list. 

CLAW CONSIDERATIONS

 On THE TOM BREVOORT EXPERIENCE, the question was raised as to why Atlas Comics had published four issues of THE YELLOW CLAW in 1956, and whether it was a response to the same-year appearance of a syndicated teleseries, THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. My response follows.

_______

Since Martin Goodman was far more known for jumping on trends than was Stan Lee, I would concur that YELLOW CLAW probably had its genesis from Goodman hearing news about the syndicated series ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, since the cover date for YELLOW CLAW #1 was October 1956, that issue probably hit stands at least two months before the first episode of ADVENTURES aired in September ’56. The comic book outlasted the series (not counting reruns), published into early 1957 some time after ADVENTURES broadcast its last new episode back in November.

Now, what might have boosted the Fu Manchu TV show? One short novelette with Fu Manchu had been published in 1952– I don’t recall where– but it didn’t see book publication in Rohmer’s lifetime, only getting collected by Daw in 1973 with three ultra-short uncollected Fu stories in WRATH OF FU MANCHU. For most readers, Fu’s last novel had been in 1947 or 1948, and the next to last full novel would show up one year after the series appeared, in 1957– UNLESS that novel got serialized in periodical form somewhere first. A lot of Fu novels were serialized before book publication, but I’ve no evidence that happened with the 1957 novel. Still, the news of a new novel with the devil-doctor might have sparked the TV show, though, as with the comic, it’s hard to coat-tail on a phenomenon if your imitation comes out FIRST.

Addendum: The Page of Fu Manchu reports that the 1957 novel had no serialization.

There might have been an uptick in Asian villains in pop media of the early fifties thanks to the Korean War, but I’m not aware of any major influential challengers to the legacy of the devil doctor– EXCEPT for Sax Rohmer’s second best known character, Sumuru. She had first appeared in a late forties radio serial, but according to one online review, Rohmer’s five novelizations of the character’s exploits did very well for paperback publisher Gold Medal in the early fifties:

Sax Rohmer’s Nude in Mink (released as Sins of Sumuru in the UK) was published in May 1950. It was Gold Medal’s seventh overall title, and their third fiction novel. Like the Fu Manchu series, it featured a series villain, Sumuru, that was molded to be a female version of her male predecessor. In the first two months, Nude in Mink went through three printings—at 200,000 copies per print run (assuming it followed Gold Medal’s usual publishing pattern), that means 600,000 copies in just 60 days. According to The Page of Fu Manchu, it would go through another printing in October 1950, followed by a fifth printing in October 1951 and then a sixth in July 1953. Not bad for a novel that was salvaged from a BBC radio serial from 1945–1946. It would also spawn several sequels: Sumuru (1951), The Fire Goddess (1952), Return of Sumuru (1954), and Sinister Madonna (1956)

http://www.pulp-serenade.com/2020/08/nude-in-mink-by-sax-rohmer-1950.html

I don’t know exactly how “Asian” Sumuru is since I’ve read only one of the novels, but her success might have sparked Rohmer to execute his last few Fu-stories, and that might have convinced TV producers that there was gold in them thar Asian mastermind hills. And of course in the mid to late fifties, syndicated TV was coming out with a lot of pulpy adaptations– Sheena, Jungle Jim, Flash Gordon– so Fu Manchu fit into that overall spirit of pulp-revival.

THE READING RHEUM: THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA (serialization 1927, book 1929)

 

In  my review of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted Wikipedia's "Sax Rohmer" essay, which alleged that Rohmer's novel THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA-- first serialized in 1927-- was an abortive attempt to write a sequel to 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU, in which EMPEROR's female villain would be revealed as Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee. However, based on the information I culled from the Rohmer biography MASTER OF VILLAINY, the Wiki article seems full of unsubstantiated speculation. The biography establishes a clearer line of circumstances. Collier's Magazine, which had serialized the previous Fu Manchu novels in America, approached Rohmer about a Fu sequel sometime in 1925, possibly in response to the appearance of two silent-movie adaptations of the devil-doctor in the preceding years. Sometime between 1925 and 1927, Rohmer completed one segment of DAUGHTER, but for some reason Collier's wouldn't pay him for individual segments, and Rohmer needed cash. So he offered the magazine a different serial, one for which the editors presumably did pay on a serialized basis, and only after that was finished did Rohmer return to DAUGHTER. It seems obvious to me that EMPEROR must have been a stand-alone concept from the first, and that Rohmer probably would have roughly plotted out part or all of DAUGHTER when he first thought he was going to serialize the whole novel in (say) 1926.

I also commented in my review that I'd read EMPEROR once before and that I didn't remember much about it. On occasion I've reread a work that didn't make  much impression on me initially, only to find in the second reading that I'd missed this or that interesting quality in the first read. Not this time, though. 

EMPEROR's problem is an exceeding thin premise, possibly not well worked-out because Rohmer devised it in haste. The novel takes place solely in New York, and posits, not unlike the much later teleseries BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, that a labyrinth of caverns exists beneath the city. A vast organization known as "The Zones" has its central HQ within these caverns, and though the organization has sanctuaries in other cities, none of the others are important to the story. The supreme ruler of the Zones is usually called "Great Head Centre," though in one defiant note to the police, the villain assumes the title "Emperor of America."

Though Rohmer tosses out about five potential protagonists, he spends the most time with a policeman, Drake Roscoe, and his everyman-buddy Dr. Stopford, who gets the novel's obligatory romantic arc. Aside from the occasional amusing line, the protagonists are boring, and the villains are made tedious by the fact, despite their immense tactical organization-- the sub-commanders all oversee different parts of New York-- Rohmer never explains what methods the Emperor means to use in conquering America. Thus EMPEROR is a novel that suggests high stakes but fails to make them seem credible.

Possibly because Fu Manchu was on Rohmer's mind at the time, he teases readers with a "Head Centre" who seems to be a yellow-skinned mummy. However, this is a fake-out, since the mummy is a dummy, a prop for the villain. The Emperor uses one Fu-like method to deal out death, that of a poisonous spider, but I don't remember anyone actually getting killed, partly because Rohmer spends so much bloody time with the intricacies of the evil spy network. 

The only good thing about EMPEROR OF AMERICA is that its existence allowed Rohmer to get this weak premise out of his system so that he didn't use it in any of the Fu Manchu books. He must have had some affection for his hero Drake Roscoe, for later he made this character an opponent in some if not all installments of a book-series devoted to yet another villainess: the Sumuru saga.

DOMINANT PRIMES AND SUBS

In the CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS series I set down four configurations with respect to stature and charisma that could applied to individual crossover narratives. However, I made frequent references to judging stature and charisma with respect to the cumulative histories of a given icon, particularly in Part 3, where I dealt in part with how stature accrues in "rotating team" serial features. Now, to better distinguish between these individual and cumulative assessments, I've extrapolated four complementary configurations designed to be applied only to cumulative assessments.

Given that one cited example of a problematic stature-character was Batman's foe The Joker, I decided to use that character and one from Part 1, Fu Manchu, as exemplars of the four configurations.

FU MANCHU was, from his first conception, a STATURE DOMINANT PRIME. The prose book series from author Sax Rohmer may have been told from the perspectives of the devil-doctor's enemies, but even when the Chinese mastermind was offstage, he was always the star of the story. Most though not all adaptations of the character to film or television followed the same pattern.

Yet one of Fu's most enduring incarnations in pop culture was in the Marvel comic book MASTER OF KUNG FU, which starred the villain's heroic son Shang-Chi. I stipulated that though Fu became a subordinate icon in this series, such was the degree of his stature that it was not diminished by his becoming a Sub. Thus within the sphere of that series, as well as a handful of other Marvel Comics appearances, Fu Manchu was a STATURE DOMINANT SUB.

The Joker evolved in a roughly opposite manner. He swiftly became the most-often used villain in Batman's rogues' gallery, but in all of these multifarious appearances, he remained a CHARISMA DOMINANT SUB.

I confess I'm not conversant with many of the Bat-books from the 21st century on, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there have been assorted Joker-focused narratives over the years. But I'm acquainted only with the nine-issue JOKER comic series of the 1970s, which did little to counter the Clown Prince's Sub reputation. In those issues, Joker would be a CHARISMA DOMINANT PRIME. I might even extend the logic of this proposition to the 2019 JOKER movie, except that it's arguable that the script suggests the possibility that Arthur Fleck may not be the canonical clown who becomes the bane of Gotham City and the Wayne Who Will Be Bats.

ROHMER REFLECTIONS

 

At the end of my review of THE GOLDEN SCORPION, I idly wondered as to whether Sax Rohmer might have meant to do something else with Fu Manchu, given that character's guest-starring appearance in the novel. I said:

Even in those early days, had Rohmer received enough negative response about Fu Manchu to make him disassociate himself from the Yellow Peril? And did any such negativity play a role in Rohmer's decision to table Fu Manchu for the next decade, until Hollywood showed some interest in a revival? Only the foremost Rohmer experts may have a clue...

Though it was a fair question, I was aware that professional writers don't live in a hothouse; projects are initiated or dropped according to whether or not they put food on the table. So I consulted the only book-length biography of Rohmer, the 1972 MASTER OF VILLAINY, written by Rohmer's widow and by his secretary Cay Van Ash. (In all likelihood Mrs. Rohmer just provided the information and Van Ash did the writing,)

I haven't finished re-reading the biography, but I sought out the chapters relevant to my main question: why had Rohmer deserted the character of Fu Manchu for roughly fourteen years, the period between the serialization of HAND OF FU MANCHU in 1917 and that of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU in 1930?

VILLAINY is a chatty bio, filled with stories of Rohmer and his wife making their way in life and traveling from place to place, with only occasional anecdotes about when Rohmer worked on this or that novel or story. No one could use this bio to chart the development of Rohmer's works generally or of the Fu Manchu character specifically. However, the chapters I read suffice to clear up some of the mysteries of the fourteen-year delay.

Though Van Ash doesn't specifically address the question as to why Rohmer allowed Fu to go dormant in the late 1910s, he does comment that the author had other fish to fry, both joining the army during WWI and later becoming involved in theater (where Fu Manchu was considered for a play-adaptation that somehow didn't come off). Van Ash supplies no anecdotes as to why Rohmer didn't follow up the intimations of a Fu-return in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION.

The biographer does, however, supply a convoluted clue about the process of the devil-doctor's recrudescence. In 1925, the American magazine Colliers apparently contacted Rohmer about a follow-up to HAND-- meaning that the true lacunae is more like eight years, not fourteen. Van Ash does not speculate as to why the magazine wanted some new Fu, though I would suggest that the editors' interest might have sparked by the two silent serial adaptations of the Chinese villain, respectively coming out in 1923 and 1924. 

Rohmer agreed, but he did so expecting that the magazine would pay him separately for each segment of the novel he delivered. To the writer's consternation, Colliers was determined not to pay until they had the whole novel. Rohmer was short of cash and could not work that far ahead without income, so after delivering his first installment of DAUGHTER, he started a new project and submitted that to Colliers. This was the novel that eventually became THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA, and though Colliers only accepted this work reluctantly, the first installment caught on with readers. Van Ash remarks that later, when Rohmer was more flush and was ready to continue with his work on DAUGHTER, Colliers then became much more bullish on further installments of EMPEROR!

Thus, my earlier speculation, though accurate based on what info I possessed at the time, is incorrect insofar as I hypothesized that Hollywood's first sound-era movie with Fu Manchu, 1929's MYSTERIOUS DR. FU-MANCHU, had encouraged Rohmer to return to his best-known character, not to mention the unnamed "daughter of Fu Manchu" who had just barely put in an appearance in 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. Not all the blanks are filled on this matter, but for the time being, "tis enough-- 'twill serve."

THE READING RHEUM: THE GOLDEN SCORPION (1918)

 

In my review of Rohmer's 1931 novel DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted a Wikipedia article about the fourteen-year gap between that novel and 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. However, this was a slight oversimplification, for two novels appeared after HAND that indirectly invoked the devil-doctor. This may mean that in the late nineteen-teens Rohmer had not yet decided to abandon the Fu-series. One of the two novels, which I may review in future, is 1913's QUEST FOR THE SACRED SLIPPER, though the allusion to the doctor is circumstantial. However, 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION makes much more than an allusion, though Fu's appearance is still in the nature of a "guest-starring role,"  of the type I addressed in this crossover-essay.

GOLDEN SCORPION takes its title from a scorpion-shaped token by which members of a criminal organization recognize one another, though the proximate reason for using the icon is that the group's mastermind is named "The Scorpion." GOLDEN is also the second of four prose novels whose main hero is the French detective Gaston Max, following directly on the heels of 1915's THE YELLOW CLAW. The two novels make an interesting contrast in that in the 1915 work, the villain is named "Mister King" and he's never seen except for his hand, which is the "yellow claw" of the title, for all that a few later comic books used the phrase for the names of super-villains. The Scorpion may be one of the few Rohmer characters who resembles a *costumed* super-villain in that he's always seen in a concealing robe and cowl, and he like Fu Manchu-- implicitly a mentor-- commands an array of super-science weapons. Further, though "Mister King" escapes at the end of CLAW and apparently never resurfaces, Gaston Max hypothesizes that both King and the Scorpion work for a great Oriental organization, albeit in different capacities. Strangely, Rohmer does not drop the name of the Si-Fan, which had just appeared in HAND, but calls the overall organization "the Sublime Order."

GOLDEN opens in a manner familiar to Rohmer readers, with an ordinary British man, medical doctor Keppel Stuart, finding his ordinary life invaded by Oriental intrigue. Significantly, because Stuart is a bachelor at age 32, Rohmer mentions that Stuart got left at the altar, a detail inserted to reassure anyone who might harbor ill suspicions of a thirty-something bachelor. Unbeknownst to the doctor, he was surreptitiously visited by famous disguise-artist/criminologist Gaston Max, who left an item of interest in Stuart's care. This causes the Scorpion's organization to target Stuart by having a comely Eurasian beauty, Miska by name, spy on the doctor by becoming his patient. As is usually the case, Oriental intrigue also breed Oriental romance, as both Miska and Stuart fall for each other. This eventually breeds retaliation in the form of a disintegrator ray that blasts into Stuart's house and almost zaps the doctor's head off. (The ray is linked to a missing scientist, Henrik Eriksen, and both the name and the creation show up much later in 1939's DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, suggesting that Rohmer had thoughts of introducing such super-science early in the series but didn't end up doing so.)

Gaston Max contacts Stuart and the local cops and relates a long story about how he Max first began investigating the Scorpion's misdeeds. causing him to encounter both Miska and her assigned guardian Chunda Lal. Max mentions that even though the Hindu is not that large, he's able to subdue a larger opponent using "jiu-jitsu," which seems to be one of the few times Rohmer ever mentioned any form of Asian martial art. During Max's consultations with the police, he manages to talk about the Si-Fan in a roundabout way, even though he's familiar with the cases investigated by "Inspector Weymouth," whose history with Fu Manchu dated back to the first novel. 

Some time after this conference, Miska contacts Stuart and warns him to keep clear of The Scorpion's menace. By this act, she shows that, like Karameneh before her, her passion liberates her from her slave-like status under an Eastern master. It's during Miska's backstory that she details not only her first encounter with the cowled Scorpion, but also with the Scorpion's superior in the Order. Miska only beholds Fu Manchu-- denoted by both his emerald-green eyes and his avowed status as "the greatest scientist in the world"-- because Fu stops by the Scorpion's HQ to inspect Miska as a new acquisition for the Order's usages. (Ironically, though Fu approves of the Scorpion's choice of Miska, the devil-doctor has no more luck with his female pawns than does the Scorpion; both end up losing said pawns to the charms of sturdy Brit males.)

Stuart of course keeps pursuing the villain, and ends up working with Max and the cops in investigating an opium-house. This is the novel's dullest part, though the section concludes with an interesting scene: Stuart is taken prisoner by a Chinese thug who strangles the doctor unconscious with the thug's long queue of hair (!) Stuart wakes up a captive in the Scorpion's lab, and like his mentor, the villain's lab combines such visceral "Asian" horrors (a pit full of killer ants) and hyper-advanced marvels (a special chair rigged to disintegrate anyone who sits in it with the Eriksen ray). While waiting for the preparation of a serum to fling Stuart into catalepsy, the mastermind informs the physician that he will soon be transported to China, where he will be brainwashed to serve the Order. Stuart asserts that he will see the villain hanged, and the urbane evildoer calls the gallows "cruel and barbaric," contrasting that Western method of execution with such a "poetic" concept as his "Throne of the Gods." This remark is in keeping with the methods of the Si-Fan, which use exotic and clever gimmicks to carry out their crimes.

I won't disclose the exciting climax, though anyone reading this will probably intuit that Miska will end up choosing to betray her master in favor of her new amour. A further connection with the Fu-series is seen when Chunda Lal attempts to kill the Scorpion to save Miska, and the mastermind resorts to a 1918 version of a Jedi mind-trick, mentally dominating the Hindu with the arcane powers gained from the Tibetan arts of "Rache Churan." When Max and the police come to the rescue, the Scorpion ends both his life and all resemblance to Fu Manchu, taking his own life through the agency of the disintegrator-chair. He unlike Fu Manchu never returns. Still, even without my having read the last of the Max novels, I imagine the cowled super-criminal rates as the foremost opponent of the French detective. 

ADDENDUM: I should also mention that at the beginning of the chapter "The Red Circle," the author, speaking through Gaston Max, attempts to distance himself and his characters from what one of the cop-characters calls 'that defunct bogey, "the Yellow Peril.''' Max responds to this jibe:

'No, I speak of no ridiculous "Yellow Peril," my friends. John Chinaman, as I have known him, is the whitest man breathing...'

Despite the incorrect nature of the phraseology for today's audience, the speaker's intent is to place the average "yellow man" on the same level of the average "white man," at least in terms of being a law-abiding citizen, unlike the Asian criminals that Max and his allies are discussing. 

Even in those early days, had Rohmer received enough negative response about Fu Manchu to make him disassociate himself from the Yellow Peril? And did any such negativity play a role in Rohmer's decision to table Fu Manchu for the next decade, until Hollywood showed some interest in a revival? Only the foremost Rohmer experts may have a clue...

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE YELLOW CLAW'S RETURN"] (STRANGE TALES #159-167. 1967-68)

At a time when all the other comics-publishers believed that their audience wouldn't support funnybooks with continued stories, Silver Age Marvel succeeded in capturing juvenile imaginations with a wealth of mini-epics-- the Master Planner storyline in SPIDER-MAN, the "Galactus Trilogy," and many others. Arguably, Jim Steranko's two long continuities in the NICK FURY AGENT OF SHIELD feature were just two more among this august company. Yet whereas the stories of the Lee-Kirby FURY had just been traditional comic-book shoot-em-ups, Steranko brought an approach that combined traditional thrills with experimental touches.

Of the two long stories Steranko did when he took over from Lee and Kirby (and occasional fill-in personnel), the first, "the Death Spore Saga," is still fairly routine, and I won't discuss that one here. But the second long continuity, to which I've given the semi-ironic title of "The Yellow Claw's Return," shows a greater audaciousness in its mining of adventure-tropes from earlier fiction. Indeed, in one of the main hero's few meditations on his past life, Fury recollects that he was raised in New York's Hell's Kitchen, right at the time when "the talkies" were coming in, and that he idolized such transitional heroes as Tom Mix and Joe Bonomo. Patently Steranko was trying to adhere to the established history of the character, who had to be in his early twenties by the time America entered WWII. But the artist's mention of serial-heroes, even those unknown to patrons today, suggests that he wanted to stress a common heritage between these heroes of cinema and the Marvel superspy.

Steranko also had a vast knowledge of pulps and comics from the early 20th century, including the works of his artist-predecessor on FURY, Jack Kirby. Steranko and Kirby had worked together on FURY, with the younger artist provided "finishes" to Kirby roughs, and there was some degree of mutual admiration between the two. I don't know at what point Steranko came across the short-lived YELLOW CLAW title that "Atlas-Marvel" published in the mid-1950s. Yet as I've shown in this brief overview of that title, Kirby's three issues of that feature weren't exactly his best work, even if one only compares those issues to other Kirby-works of that decade. So why did Steranko choose to revive-- and I use that word advisedly-- a character whom few if any of his contemporary readers remembered?

First of all, anyone who reads Steranko's two-part HISTORY OF COMICS (1970/1972) would have noticed that the artist possessed a near-encylopedic knowledge of adventure-oriented pop culture dating back to the early 20th century. Because he was a fan-turned-pro in a more methodical manner than his predecessor Kirby, he probably remembered Kirby's YELLOW CLAW series better than Kirby did back in The Day. Not only does Steranko revive a version of the central villain, a patent Fu Manchu emulation, he also brings back the other support-characters from the series: the Claw's aide Voltzmann, his niece Suwan, and the evildoer's Asian-American opponent Jimmy Woo (with whom Suwan was in love, providing the only real trope-link to the prose works of Sax Rohmer). 

Still, there are clear departures. Steranko borrows some elements of the original costume-design for the villain (originated not by Kirby but by Joe Maneely), the character from the 1950s series looks like a reserved older man despite his reputation for uncanny long life. Steranko's Claw is lanky and powerful, clad in body-armor and a skullcap reminiscent of the Lev-Gleason CLAW, and whereas all Asians in the 1950s series had canary-yellow skin, the 1960s version is the only one so colored. Steranko's Yellow Claw has a bony face, heavy eyebrows that emphasize his epicanthic folds, and bony fingers with inch-long nails-- the latter visual trope taking us back to the whole "Asians with claws" trope I examined here. Further, unlike the fifties Atlas character, Steranko's villain has a nodding resemblance to the forties actor Richard Loo, seen above playing a mean Japanese officer in 1944's THE PURPLE HEART.

The only strong resemblance between Kirby's Yellow Claw and that of Steranko is that under Kirby, the 1950s Claw channeled a lot more wild super-science. But in the Lee-Kirby NICK FURY, both the good guys and the bad guys were constantly hurling dozens of super-science gadgets against one another, and Steranko, by taking over the custody of the feature, did the same. Did Nick Fury have a "sonic shatter cone" and a "magnetic repulsor watch?" Well, then, the Yellow Claw can have an "id-paralyzer," an "infinity sphere" with a "nucleo-phoretic drive," and an "ultimate annihilator,"-- well, OK, he does steal that one from the organization AIM-- but still! 

Now, Steranko's Claw is occasionally more recherche in his use of Asian tropes than the 1950s character was. The new version speaks in a flowery, pseudo-Oriental lingo, and when Fury briefly disguises himself to be Asian to hoax the villain, the hero thinks to himself that he got all his dialogue from "old Charlie Chan flicks." Yet one good effect of all the techno-overkill is that this Yellow Claw doesn't really have any roots in the world of any Real Asians, aside from his long nails and his dialogue. (Only once does Steranko make an egregious all-Asians-are-alike goof, by having the Chinese fiend address the hero as "Fury-san.") I theorize that to Steranko, Asian villains were simply a useful, familiar trope dispersed all through pop culture, with no particular political content.

As breakneck as Jack Kirby's pace could be in his action sequences, Steranko barely allows for any characters to take a breath in the eight installments of RETURN. The pace of the narrative is akin to that of the most raucous Republic serials, with frequent use of teleportation tech to send Fury and his opponents zooming from one locale to another. Fury has various aides-- many familiar faces introduced in RETURN for the first time, such as The Gaffer, Clay Quartermain, and Fury's gal-pal Countess Val-- and there are even some superhero crossovers, such as Captain America and two members of the Fantastic Four. But Fury's really the whole show, careening through hordes of heavily armed killers with his forty-year old hardbody and his handful of super-gadgets. 

I won't go into the many ways in which Steranko incorporated contemporary design-elements and artistic tropes into RETURN, but if one moment most captures Steranko's channeling of the swinging sixties mood, it's the conclusion to RETURN. After Fury's tumultuous battle with the Claw, it's revealed that this Claw was a robot, as were Suwan and Voltzmann (but not Jimmy Woo, who came back only to see a simulacrum of his love get killed). The entire battle between SHIELD and the Claw's forces was an enormous chess-game that the diabolical Doctor Doom played against a robot chess-master. This was the closest Marvel Comics could come to something like 1967's THE PRISONER, in which the viewer sees the whole game of genre-battles exposed as a "magic shadow-show." 

About five years later, the real Yellow Claw came out of retirement in a CAPTAIN AMERICA continuity, and Steve Englehart gave this version a lot more of that old Sax Rohmer exoticism, mere months before the same writer linked up the Marvel-rented property of Fu Manchu with the new character, Shang-Chi Master of Kung Fu. But though the real villain mouthed a few lines about getting even with whoever had played game with his image, I don't believe the "revised original Claw"-- who of course looked just like Steranko's robot-- even crossed paths with Doctor Doom. The revived character never really became a major player at Marvel Comics, and later got substantially revised so as to purge him of any fiendish Asian tropes. Naive though Steranko's mini-epic might be, it's still the high water-mark for this curious character.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE COMING OF THE YELLOW CLAW" (YELLOW CLAW #1, 1956)

 Following up on my post about "Marvel's" first Yellow Claw, I looked over the four issues devoted to the 1956 version, presumably the first Asian villain to get his own title at that particular company (previously "Timely," changed to "Atlas" in the 1950s). In the previous essay I speculated that it was probably Stan Lee who remembered the title of  the Sax Rohmer novel YELLOW CLAW and *possibly* from the Captain America story that re-used the name, which Lee edited whether he wrote it or not. This speculation is somewhat supported by an anecdote on this message board, where one poster claims that credited writer Al Feldstein did not brainstorm the 1956 Claw, but simply took the job as another assignment. It's also possible that Lee decided to center a title around the adventures of an Oriental mastermind because he'd heard that Rohmer's devil doctor was going to get his own syndicated TV show, THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU, which would air in September 1956. YELLOW CLAW #1, dated October 1956, probably appeared on newsstands two or three months prior to that cover date.

Lee probably had the idea to emphasize the new character as a mysterioso figure whom hostile Chinese Communists attempted to unleash upon the democracies-- little knowing that the Claw, an immortal man and a master of strange powers, planned to dominate every government on Earth. Possibly Lee had read Rohmer's 1948 SHADOW OF FU MANCHU, in which the devil-doctor first established Fu's animus toward Communist China. Later post-1956 Rohmer novels included a few scenes in which Fu Manchu used the Communist Chinese for his own purposes-- though it would appear that the Yellow Claw got the idea first.

Since all of the Chinese characters in the story are colored yellow-- as well as being given realistic depictions by artist Joe Maneely-- there seems no particular reason for the main villain to be styled "yellow." The Claw is also drawn realistically, with no special emphasis on the longness and boniness of his fingers, as one sees in many other Asian villain-depictions. The story meanders somewhat as it sets up the intersection between the Claw, his grand-niece Suwan, and modern FBI agent Jimmy Woo, with whom Suwan falls in love.

The restrained depiction of Asian physical characteristics suggests that Lee, Feldstein and Maneely were consciously avoiding the old stereotypes, and the depiction of Jimmy Woo clinches the deal. Woo is to all intents and purposes a "regular American Joe" who just happens to be Asian, and to a small extent he represents a trope in which a modern Asian opposes the archaic evil of China, a trope which the MASTER OF KUNG FU comic mined so impressively.

Since the FU MANCHU show was not a great success, it's no surprise that YELLOW CLAW tanked by the following year. Neither Feldstein nor Maneely contributed to the last three issues; instead, Lee assigned Jack Kirby to both write and draw all of the Yellow Claw stories.  Kirby made precious little attempt to emulate either Sax Rohmer or even just generalized "Asian menace" stories. Instead, he simply used the villain as a conduit through which assorted wild and woolly sci-fi menaces manifested-- a giant Mongolian warrior (actually a robot), a naive alien called "UFO the Lightning Man," a microscopic army. These stories might be seen as precursors to Kirby's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which had a similar orientation, but clicked better with readers. 

Next up: the Silver Age Claw.

A PAUSE FOR CLAWS

At the end of my YELLOW CLAW review, I said:

...in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

What "racial myth?" The one I suggested in my 2016 review of the first story that introduced "Shang-Chi, son of Fu Manchu." In part I focused upon not one but two racial myths represented by the debut cover.

Of the depiction of Fu Manchu I said:

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Now, though I reviewed all of Rohmer's Fu Manchu books in recent years, I wasn't specifically checking to see when if at all the early books showed the devil-doctor with either pointed ears or claw-fingers, nor have I checked to see whether or not the early covers for the books utilize such iconography. But there's not much question that the 1915 YELLOW CLAW does use the latter image to signify its barely-seen villain "Mister King."

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

 

And later in the same novel:

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him.

So whether Rohmer or any other predecessor used the "Asian claw" motif, it's definitely there in the 1915 CLAW novel. Rohmer's "Mister King" is not that memorable a villain, being nothing but a mundane drug-dealer, and so he cannot be said to share the "aristocratic" background attributed to Fu Manchu. But since he doesn't have a background of any kind, readers also can't see him as anything but a vague spectre of evil. In the second King section, Gaston Max thinks of King in this way:

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Did Rohmer really mean to suggest that King was "a Thing," like something out of Lovecraft (or even a Robert E. Howard rewriting of HPL?) Nothing in Rohmer would support such a thesis. But his visual focus on King as a pair of nearly disembodied yellow hands has a certain mythic appeal. It suggests that King's "hold" over London's criminal demimonde also constitutes a "stranglehold" upon the daylight world of London, inhabited by sensible Brits. 

Though Rohmer gives King a racial connotation, the image of "evil hands" is certainly not CONFINED to Asian characters. One year before the publication of YELLOW CLAW, the American serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE debuted a character that some scholars consider to be "cinema's first mystery-villain"-- and this character, The Clutching Hand, was dramatized in the advertisements by making him seem to be a disembodied pair of evil hands. But since the villain here was played by a flesh and blood actor, the actual Clutching Hand is a guy in a bandanna, who holds one hand up in a clawlike rictus most likely to make moderns think he's arthritic.

Now, I mentioned in the YELLOW CLAW review that most Marvel Comics fan only know one character named "Yellow Claw"-- though even that reference is qualified by the fact that this 1956 character wasn't the first of his comic-book kind. Instead, in 1942 we see the company's first Yellow Claw, who battles Captain America and Bucky with his "petals of doom." Neither the original story nor GCD attributes a name to the writer, though it's possible that editor Stan Lee wrote it. (Lee served in the Army Signal Corps from 1942 to 1945 but stated that he continued mailing scripts to his company during that period.) 

The second page definitely utilizes the "clutching yellow claw" image:

Lee certainly could have derived the name of this villain from having read or even just seen Rohmer's novel. However, nowhere in the story is it explicitly stated that the Claw is any sort of Asian. Here's his first clear depiction from page ten:

The Claw is mostly colored Caucasian, and he doesn't have slanted eyes, though the fanglike teeth were typical for negative Asian depictions. Only his hands are yellow, but no one in the story comments on this anomaly. The villain is given no solid motive for sending poisonous flowers to members of the U.S. military. Why not make him Japanese, since the country was at war with that Asian country? But this would have conflicted with the big reveal: that the blonde-haired villain is actually a previously introduced Caucasian, one "Captain Elliott." Maybe his hands only turned yellow from working with poisons? It's worth remembering that Fu Manchu, unlike Mister King, makes frequent reference to using flowers to produce sedatives.

I doubt Stan Lee, even if he scripted this weird story, consciously remembered the character when he greenlighted the 1956 YELLOW CLAW comic book. Still, maybe he suggested to the book's scripter the use of the name for the title villain, recalling less the Captain America tale than the Rohmer title. And throughout the first issue, Yellow Claw, unlike Mister King, emulates the established iconography of Fu Manchu, who I believe did have in some depictions excessively long (and hence aristocratic) fingernails. None of the other Asians in the first issue are given any exaggerated features, so Yellow Claw is also imposing, as the cover copy says, because he's something hard to identify: "who-- or what-- is he?"

I had planned to work in a reference to the Yellow Claw's quasi-revival in the 1960s, but now I think I may give that revival separate attention in a future essay.