PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

Sax Rohmer has a lot to answer for.

the Golden Dragon:

We've seen it before and we'll see it again - the Golden Dragon is yet another Fu Manchu-style Yellow Peril crimelord bent on bending the world to his will. He messes up by making his campaign of kidnapping and extortion a bit too obvious, which attracts the attention of the Invisible Hood, who in turn rallies various kidnap victims etc into a fighting force to take the Dragon's organization down from within. (Smash Comics 013, 1940)

the Key: 

The Key is a Chinese gang boss operating out of London who specializes in getting his men out of prison almost as soon as they go in, by the simple expedient of faking their deaths with an exotic drug then recovering their "corpses" once they're trucked off for burial. The twist is that the Key is in fact the very non-Chinese warden of Yorkshire Prison, where all of these guys are escaping from. Two things about the Key: 1. while his mask is presumably just as effective and lifelike as any other rubberoid prosthetic in comics it is also just king of hilariously and obviously strapped onto his face as you can see above, and 2. dovetailing from this, I do not think that the Key was originally going to be the warden. I think that someone took a look at a story about a regular gang boss who was just very good at jailbreaks and decided that it needed something more and so went through and added some extra juice via the addition of the mask and a few lines ("Hmm... That voice is familiar...") to the already-drawn panels. For what it's worth, which is not much. (Smash Comics 013, 1940)

the Scarlet Seal:

The Scarlet Seal! A character who I absolutely was thinking of when I established the Problematic Round-Up, because he is Very Problematic!

The basic concept of the Scarlet Seal is fairly innocuous, and in fact is one that creator Harry Campbell returned to again and again: the hero who excels at their first career but then casts that aside to take up scientific pursuits, and then is forced into the role of detective by circumstance. There's been Wizard Wells (football star to scientist to reluctant detective), Dean Denton (world's greatest ventriloquist to scientist to detective), John Law, kind of (scientist to lawyer to detective, but really all at once), and now Barry Moore, who leaves a lucrative career as a film star to become a police scientist back in his home town of Center City, and eventually segues into the role of vigilante.

As far as the problematic aspect of the character goes, there are actually two distinct strains of the stuff going on here. The first involves the Center City Police Commissioner, a namby-pamby former social worker and bleeding heart liberal strawman who doesn't even believe in torturing confessions out of people (and also bans the use of informants and undercover police officers for unclear reasons). As it turns out, it was only the threat of the rubber hose that was keeping the Center City underworld in check, and the press is having a field day at the expense of  Barry Moore's dad, Police Chief Moore.

It's at this point that Barry decides that what Center City really needs is some sort of vigilante willing to go out and do the hard work that this soft-hearted Commissioner didn't have the stones for. And you know, if that was it, if he had just put on a costume and set off into the night to beat people up, then it would just be a more extreme version of the authoritarian streak that comic book fans of a more thoughtful nature have always had to reckon with.

But no, because Barry Moore it turns out was not just any actor, he was a villainous character actor, and the last movie he made was one in which he played a sinister Asian. Thus, he makes the decision to weaponize his skill at yellowface by establishing a secondary identity as Wen au Chung, importer of Chinese goods, who in turn is the sinister Scarlet Seal, bane of the underworld and the police alike. It's the old classic Green Hornet setup where the Scarlet Seal acts like he's horning in on various criminal enterprises while actually setting up the crooks to be arrested or (more frequently) killed.

Two further things: 1. He's called the Scarlet Seal because he leaves a red stamp on the foreheads of his victims and 2. In the above panels the Scarlet Seal has just allowed the issue's crooks to kill each other in a gunfight and then arranges things so that one of them, a corrupt cop, is posthumously acclaimed as a hero rather than being held accountable for his crimes. An infuriating character in every respect, that's our Scarlet Seal. (Smash Comics 016, 1940)

Dr Feng: 

Yet another Fu Manchu Yellow Peril villain who is actually a white guy in yellowface. This time we have Dr Feng, head of the Ling Yung Tong aka the Yellow Death Society, but in actuality Blaine Moffat, wealthy real estate mogul. Much of his appearance is taken up with a self-kidnapping scheme to get out of the fact that he has murdered an investigator who got too close, so his actual motivation for becoming a problematic super-villain are left unexplored. (Startling Comics 001, 1940)