ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 017

A panoply of wonders awaits.

Karnak's Slaves: 

This otherwise-unnamed race from an unnamed planet get a pretty raw deal: conquered and mind-controlled into servitude by scientist Karnak, they all seemingly die when he does. It's a real shame. (Weird Comics 007, 1940) 

the Deadly Plants: 

It's hard to say much about the so-called "Deadly Plants" of planet Vegeto, aside from the fact that they work together to capture a handful of prospective human colonists and dump them in a pit, and that for this act of moderate aggression the Red Comet dumps the entire termite population of Earth on them, seemingly wiping out their entire species. This is what we call "disproportionate response" but is in perfect keeping with the 1940s (and beyond!) view of the relative value of human life vs all other life. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)

Dhakka Snail-Men: 

Every undersea race in comics needs a selection of other undersea races to have conflict with, and Neptina's Fish-Men are no exception. They are menaced by the Dhakkas, aka the Snail-Men, led by Prince Petor, who attempts to invade the territories of Amloza for no stated reason - I guess that's just what you do when you have an army and an abyssal plain to march across. Unfortunately for Petor and his ambitions, Neptina and the Fish-Men are backed up by Brad Fletcher and his Super-Sub, which are enough to decisively turn the tide. 

The Snail-Men also might be some of the least like their namesake of any of the [animal]-Men we have yet encountered. They ride snails, sure, but about the only thing that they themselves have in common with snails are some pretty modest eyestalks. (Champion Comics 009, 1940)

Dragon-Lizard Men: 

Encountered by detective Fu Chang as he searches for treasure on fabled Money Pit Island, the Dragon-Lizard Men are not so much guardians as obstacles on the way to wealth. The most remarkable thing about them is that if they are as Fu Chang asserts descended from the "lizard and dragons" left on the island by the treasure-burying pirates they managed to not only evolve into fully humanoid forms but also enough of a sense of shame to wear briefs over their mysterious lizard and/or dragon genitals. Nature is really amazing. (Pep Comics 009, 1940)

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 004

Get ready for a collection of MLJ's finest racially-problematic villains.

Yen Fat Sing: 

Yen Fat Sing's deal is that he knows about a treasure buried on Fu Chang's charity farm and, in an effort to grab that treasure for himself, has been murdering the workers using man-eating plants. He's a pretty standard type of minor super-villain but because he is a Fu Chang foe he is of course a generic Yellow Peril character on top of that. A couple of remarkable things about Yen Fat Sing: 

1. after all the effort to run everyone off the farm, once Fu Chang is closing in he just sneaks onto the grounds and digs up the treasure, suggesting that he could have done that all along and particularly so because nobody knew about the treasure at all until he ran his mouth about it.

2. Yen Fat Sing is killed in the course of the story but, unlike virtually every other comic book villain to have anything to do with carnivorous plants, he is not eaten by a tree but rather dies in a car crash.

I do rally like that the man-eating plants only attack in the dark. That's a fun detail. (Pep Comics 005, 1940)

Joodar the Evil:

Joodar the Evil starts out as an evil equivalent to Fu Chang, only instead of accessing his power via supplication to an ancestral god with a tonsure, Joodar worships the Great Genii of the Water Demons, and instead of a very eclectic set of animated chess figures...

... Joodar is granted the services of - you guessed it - water demons. Though his stated plans involve world domination, Joodar has a lot of trouble with step 1: destroy Fu Chang, to the extent that both the Great Genii and his Water Demon crew end up destroyed. (Pep Comics 006, 1940)

Joodar returns in the next issue, potentially because "summoning water demons" isn't a crime in San Francisco. This time he is without his demon pals and so he turns to the next best things: bacteria and mosquitoes! Specifically, he has mixed up a big batch of different harmful bacteria and stuck 'em in some mosquitoes in order to create havoc in San Francisco's Chinatown. Why does he do this? It's not entirely clear. Generic revenge? Mass chaos? Joodar doesn't really deliver a coherent thesis statement I'm afraid.

Joodar's greatest creation is this enormous mosquito, which almost takes out Fu Chang and his fiance Tay Ming but ultimately cannot contend with those pesky magic chessmen. Joodar, as far as I know, just absconds into the night - perhaps mosquito-crime is also not illegal in San Francisco. (Pep Comics 007, 1940)

Dr Wang:

Dr Wang is a Yellow Peril villain in the true Fu Manchu mould, a sinister genius who strikes at the security of the US for no stated reason. It's possible that we are meant to read Asian villain = Japanese, but if I'm honest an evil mastermind who plots against the United States for the sheer cussed challenge of it it quite a bit more evocative.

Dr Wang is so threatening to the secuirty of the country, in fact, that we are introduced to him in media res ad the Shield attempts to murder him by dropping a boulder on his car. This is that proactive super-hero action that we al1 wanted in the late aughts!

Dr Wang has two things going for him: the first is his mask, which looks great. Terrific style of mask, particularly with a hat. The second is his plan to disrupt US war production, by rounding up a bunch of guys who are afflicted with cholera and hypnotizing them into getting jobs in arms factories, thus starting a targeted cholera epidemic. And the very fun thing about this is that cholera is mostly spread by contact with infected feces, so these factories must be disgusting.

The Shield cannot of course let this stand, and goes back for another try at solving the Dr Wang Problem, and you know what they say: the second time is the charm - plus it's a bit more narratively satisfying for the Shield not to do a premeditated murder! (Shield-Wizard Comics 002, 1940)

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 009

Some day these won't inevitably start with Hitler. Some day.

Adolf Hitler:

Rix, a human living on Venus in the peaceful year 3090 CE, learns about dictators thanks to the time capsule from the 1939 New York World's Fair and immediately sets out to make himself into the Hitler of the future. Beat down by interplanetary troubleshooter Planet Payson. (Planet Comics 008, 1940)

Aviator Ted O'Neil is brought down in the warlike nation of Gestapia (one of the more on-the-nose Nazi Germany stand-ins I have encountered), ruled over by dictator "Schnitzler." (Prize Comics 004, 1940)

Al Capone:

It's just a shorthand reference for "bigtime gangster" but Scarface Marone here is absolutely an Al Capone pastiche for the one and a half panels he appears in before jumping out a window to avoid capture. (Rocket Comics 002, 1940)

Anna Roosevelt:

She's referred to only as "the President's daughter" throughout this adventure which sees her being kidnapped and almost killed by Gerlandian spies before being rescued by Electro here, but it's 1940 and the US has had precisely one President's Daughter for nearly eight years at this point and it's Anna Roosevelt. (Science Comics 001, 1940)

Captain Nemo:

It shouldn't have surprised me when Navy Jones, established in the previous issue to be descended from the legendary Davy Jones, encounters not-just-fictional-but-fictional-from-about-seventy-years-earlier figure Captain Nemo while noodling around under the sea with his paramour Princess Coral, but I'm afraid that it did. And not only do they team up to battle octopus men and recover an ancient Roman map to Atlantis together but Nemo basically joins the "Navy Jones" cast going forward! (Science Comics 005, 1940)

FDR:

Minor Appearances:

Science Comics 003, 1940

Genghis Khan:

Obvious allusion to Genghis Khan in Khangiz, the warlike master of Mars in the year 40 000 CE. (Planet Comics 002, 1940)

J Edgar Hoover:

You have a comic book character who works for the FBI and eventually an unnamed J Edgar Hoover is going to show up and congratulate them for doing their job, as happens to FBI agent Buck Brady here. (Prize Comics 005, 1940)

J Edgar Hoover is not only Joe "the Shield" Higgins' boss at the FBI but he was the best friend of Tom Higgins, Joe's father. (Shield-Wizard Comics 001, 1940)

Minor appearances:

Science Comics 003, 1940

Oak Island:

Even though Fu Chang operates out of San Francisco and thus Money Pit Island is located somewhere in the Pacific, its name alone twigs it as at least inspired by the legend of Oak Island, which (I checked) was indeed going strong as of 1940 (Pep Comics 009, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 687: PRINCESS LING FOY

(Pep Comics 004, 1940)

Princess Ling Foy probably belongs in the Problematic Round-Up with all of Fu Chang's other enemies (and Fu Chang himself, of course) - she's just as steeped in racist tropes as any of them, right down to her dumb name. But... I have to say that I like her hat.

I also like her minions, the Warriors of Brass, which strongly resemble robots but which are by all accounts magical creations. Let's spit the difference and call them automata, and honestly it doesn't really matter because Fu Chang destroys them all with what must be some wildly powerful acid.

Fu Chang spares Ling Foy's life but also rejects her proposal that they rule Chinatown together (and "ruling Chinatown" is just as nebulous a concept as when all those Fantomah villains were attempting to conquer "the Jungle" - are you going to be sending a representative to the San Francisco City Council or is this just a glorified protection racket?) which of course returns her to the path of crime precisely one second after Fu Chang gives her a second chance. Ling Foy heads right home to make a fairly low-effort sympathetic magic effigy out of wax, but regardless of quality it works. The only way Fu Chang is able to keep going is with the help of an infusion of healing juice from his magic chessmen, and even then he's walking around with his arm in a sling.

Having failed to gain revenge on Fu Chang by killing him, Ling Foy now summons an imp in an attempt to murder his fiance Tay Ming and once again the chessmen save the day, as tiny man battles tiny demon in a scene much more action-packed than a Fu Chang comic usually gets.

The imp spills the beans on Ling Foy's location and since Fu Chang can't bring himself to harm a lady, Tay Ming takes out the trash.

(If you read the Fu Chang entry and were wondering about what exactly the mermaid figure was used for, then this is your lucky day! As Ling Foy dies, the wax effigy of Fu Chang falls out the window into San Francisco Bay with a couple of knives still in it. The mermaid swims down and removes them, thus saving Fu Chang from a lifetime of feeling like he had two knives stuck in him)

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 003

This edition of the Problematic Round-Up is devoted to minor MLJ character Fu Chang and his foes.

Fu Chang:

Reading Charlie Chan comics has absolutely messed my head up in a specific way: because Charlie Chan is so clearly a project with the set goal of having a Chinese character who is not an overt racist Yellow Peril stereotype (while, yes, being pretty racist in a bunch of other ways) I give it more of the benefit of the doubt than I otherwise would. For instance, I just kind of skim most of what Charlie Chan says because actually parsing it is very painful. 

The problem is, I keep automatically giving various other series featuring Chinese American detectives the benefit of the doubt, and very few of them are also earnest-but-flawed attempts to avoid the overtly racist tropes of the day. This is all to say Fu Chang and his adventures are pretty racist and it caught me off guard and I had to work through it here.

So: Fu Chang is an American educated Chinese man (with a more Caucasian skin tone than the bright yellow Evil Chinese such as the Dragon, below) who is very dedicated to his (personal? family?) god and as a result has been gifted a chess set with "all the magic powers of Aladdin's Lamp" (and this smearing of everything East of the Mediterranean into one big exotic mess is classic Orientalism) which in effect means that he has a bunch of little guys at hand to do his bidding.

If there's one fun thing about Fu Chang, it's trying to figure out exactly what the heck kind of game this chess set could be used for. Here are the known pieces:

- the Warrior - just a little guy, used to spy on folks

- unnamed stage magician - has ESP or other way of locating hidden objects

- the Little Man of Magic - a magician in the Indian mystic vein. More talkative and proactive than many others. Able to paralyze humans via magic 

- the Doctor - healing plus some hand-to hand. Also has wings in one story

- the Mermaid - amphibious

- the Woodsman - tree-chopping action

- a pilot - can fly a plane but the plane is sold separately

- group of men in suits plus military officer and a jodhpured adventurer - engage in combat with the Tiger-Devil

- Seen but never used: the shirtless guy, the blonde lady in the red dress, the policeman, the crook, the fat bald guy

- winged people - obviously they can fly. As the series goes on the winged figures show up more and more until the last few adventures feature nothing but up to a couple of dozen of them.

I suppose it's possible that you could cobble together a complete chess set out of those. Obviously the winged guys would be the pawns, but where would the mermaid come in? Even more concerning than the fact that there might not have been a complete Fu Chang lore bible with detailed breakdowns of all the chess pieces and their powers is the constant slander of Aladdin's lamp. Unless Fu Chang and his god have a chronic lack of imagination, this is a pretty weak showing from a fabled object. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

the Dragon:

The Dragon is really notable only for his fantastic name as well as to illustrate the weird vibes-based skin-colouring in the Fu Chang comic - the more good and Westernized you are, the pinker your skin. Otherwise he's a creep and a low-level Yellow Peril gangster. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

the Cult of the Tiger-Devil: 

While I love the Tiger-Devil itself, the Tiger-Devil Cult that serves and has summoned him is some pan-Asian degeneracy nonsense straight out of Lovecraft. Serves them right for summoning a demon to conquer the world with that it gets beaten up by a bunch of little chessmen - though the Tiger-Devil has dominion over all men, the chess pieces are no men. 

If the MLJ Universe hadn't stopped being a continuous continuity in the early 90s it might be more significant that the Tiger-Devil ends up sealed in a jar and dropped into San Francisco Bay. Alas. (Pep Comics 002, 1940)

the Drug-Master:

It's a Fu Chang sweep for this instalment of the Problematic Round-Up with Ghor here, aka the Drug-Master, a very hard-core name that I wish I could celebrate a bit more but no: he's yet another Yellow Peril type with a bit of added spice in that he is also involved in the sinister Asian Drug Trade. Specifically, he's bringing a powerful new drug into San Francisco's Chinatown, one so addictive that it makes anyone his slave rather than do without it, even Fu Chang's fiance Tay Ming. It's so potent, in fact, that withdrawal induces a suicidal/homicidal frenzy and since the Drug-Master does not seem to be a particularly good boss, he's letting his drug slaves go into withdrawal all over town. As is usually the case, the skills that make a criminal successful in human circles are of little use against a bunch of Fu Chang's tiny guys and the Drug-Master ends up blowing himself to kingdom come. (Pep Comics 003, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 033

Minor super-heroes, we got 'em.

Little Giant: 

Professor Rednow has some inventions to test and he has secured an orphan boy named Rusty for that purpose. Rusty is first given a serum that is supposed to turn him into a big hunk of beefcake but instead he becomes a kid with super strength. He then gets an outfit with anti-gravity properties that allow him to leap around like a small Hulk and finally is coated in "impurvogen," a high-tech chemical that renders him invulnerable.

In case you were having some doubts about Professor Rednow's devotion to scientific ethics: I don't think that he has any. It's just lucky for young Rusty that all of this stuff works or he might end up buried in the Professor's back yard alongside half a dozen other orphan boys.

Rusty and the Professor end up moving to NYC and becoming special deputies in the NYPD but, as with the Phantom Knight before him, the Little Giant only really had a couple of adventures and the second one continues to be out of my price range. (OK Comics 001, 1940)

the Shield:

The Shield is Joe Higgins, "G-Man Extraordinary," an FBI agent who battles threats to the US using a super-suit of his own design (a design that supposedly was the reason for Captain America switching from his original shield to the round one so as not to look too much like his patriotic counterpart, by the way). 

Over the years the Shield's status is subject to the usual comic drift: his powers go from being solely derived from his suit to involving some sort of super serum or ray or two of those, or all three. We're talking about the 1940 version of the character, though, and he was all suit, baby. The suit itself did slim down considerably from the first issue to the second, but we can chalk that up to a refinement of the technology (and to the more form-fitting top being a bit more flattering than the big chunky breastplate look).

One thing about the Shield that I had never known prior to reading his first appearance was that his motivation for becoming a costumed crimefighter was that his father died in the Black Tom Explosion as a result of German sabotage during WWI. Thus, the Shield has the Batman origin but for espionage!  (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

UPDATE (Shield-Wizard Comics 001, 1940)

the Comet:

John Dickering is a scientist who invents a gas that when injected gives him super jumping abilities. Too late he learns the reason that so many scientists do extensive testing before trying out serums etc on themselves, as the gas also gives him disintegrating ray vision that can only be held in check by a glass visor, Cyclops-style. Thus, he becomes the Comet.

There are a number of remarkable things about the Comet over the years but the only ones relevant to the 1940 version of the character are 1. the fact that he has one of the truly great Golden Age costumes and 2. just how very willing he is to kill his foes. I guess when all you have is a disintegrating ray every problem looks like a disintegratable nail. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

the Rocket:

The Rocket is your classic example of an explorer coming to a lost/hidden/alien world and becoming its greatest champion. The most common example of this is your garden-variety jungle adventurer, with "modern man transported into an effete future" and "guy falls through hole into underground world" being other common examples.

The Rocket's adventures, on the other hand, happen... somewhere. He arrives via his namesake rocket ship - is the Diamond Empire located in the future? on an alien world? on a lost mesa or in a hidden valley? No idea, never addressed. He just shows up because he heard there was a hot queen running the joint and that's all we get.

After a rocky start, the Rocket manages to win over the titular Queen of Diamonds, going from her slave to her bodyguard to eventually becoming her lover/ adventuring companion. And if you read the above panels you might have noticed how very racist the Queen's origin story is, another thing that is extremely in keeping with this man-in-a-strange-land style comic: white guy exceptionalism. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)