PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 006

Every time I relax, another one emerges from the shrubbery. And what's depressing is the fact that they will continue emerging at a more or less steady rate for the entire history of comics. Here's the latest batch of Problematic Characters.

the Voodoo Man: 

When Dr Bob Warren heads to Haiti to practice medicine and "investigate voodoo", he comes into conflict with the Voodoo Man, a zombie-raising, curse-spouting, doll-pinning collection of every voodoo trope and stereotype. As compared to other headlining super-villains, the Voodoo Man's exploits are pretty one-note: he's trying to exert control over part or all of Haiti using zombies and other magics, while Warren foils him at every turn.

The Voodoo Man's finest moment is probably the time he turns an old woman into a pig to vex his enemies, but as always serving a super-villain is a dicey prospect, OSHA-wise, and the pig-woman gets a knife in the back for her efforts. (Weird Comics 001, 1940) 

For a couple of issues (Weird Comics 004 and 005, specifically), Bob Warren seems to be pilling a Thin Man and becoming the Voodoo Man, as in a man who battles voodoo practitioners. Rather than the original titular Voodoo Man, Warren takes on a very similar fellow named Boanga (above) and the Grand Zombie (below), but after that the one and only original returns for the rest of the feature's annoyingly long run.

the Grand Zombie: 

The Grand Zombie's appearance coincides with a change in the "Voodoo Man" creative team, as evidenced by Bob Warren suddenly becoming a clean-shaven blonde instead of a mustachioed brunette. There is a chance that he is meant to in fact *be* the Voodoo Man, as his modus operandi - turn people into zombies for his own enrichment - is the same, but given that he looks completely different, operates at a site on the other side of the island and is called something else I'm willing to call the Grand Zombie a different character. 

The Grand Zombie name, in addition to being a far better one than the Voodoo Man, reflects a linguistic quirk that might have been widespread but which I have only encountered in old comics, in which both the unquiet dead and their creators are referred to as zombies. Better name or not, the Grand Zombies is unceremoniously shot at the end of the story and the feature then reverts back to the Voodoo Man.

This issue also feature perhaps the least empathetic missionary character in Golden Age comics. (Weird Comics 004, 1940)

the Magic Mandarin: 

The Magic Mandarin, aka Lee Ching, importer, is an extremely typical Yellow Peril villain. Perhaps the only moment of joy I found in his entire first appearance was when he met up with his fellows in the Brothers of the Bloody Blade (above) and they kept screaming "Allegiance!" at one another.

The thing that puts the magic in the Magic Mandarin is an artifact called the Stone or Lodestone of the Dragon which is capable of such feats as paralyzing others, creating a force field, changing someone's clothing and telekinesis, but which is unable to function if swaddled in silk or affect someone who is wearing silk, which comes in very handy for the Mandarin's foes Smash Dawson and his team.

The Magic Mandarin is one of your classic "seems to die at the end of every adventure but turns out to have survived in the next" villains, and like so many of those his final appearance must be assumed to be the one that finally killed him, as he was sucked into a dam in Whirlwind Comics 003 and there was no Whirlwind Comics 004. (Whirlwind Comics 001, 1940) 

Fu Chu: 

Fu Chu is a recurring villain of Yarko the Great, and while he is so patently a Fu Manchu knockoff that he even has most of his name, his major offence is in how boring he is. Like, I don't find Yellow Peril comic book plots particularly fun to read, but at least they are usually rich with incident. Fu Chu's debut involves him kidnapping the inventor of a death ray and then completely failing to prevent Yarko from waltzing in and taking him back.

Fu Chu's second appearance, in Wonderworld Comics 016, features him as the head of a cult of the Mayan Plumed Serpent Kukulkan, for reasons that are never quite explained, as the main thrust of the episode involves Fu Chu attempting to kill explorer Doctor Mayo and his daughter and Yarko the Great intervening to save them. The whole farce ends with an earthquake destroying all or part of Chichen Itza, which is wild.

Fu Chu goes on to return at least a couple of times in 1941 but don't hold your breath - he'll have to really up his game to get an update, (Wonderworld Comics 013, 1940) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 821: KONG

(Thrilling Comics 003, 1940)

I can't really devote a lot of energy to Kong because he just kind of makes me tired, conceptually. He's a Yellow Peril dictator who has devoted a fair amount of time and resources to stealing both military secrets and entire scientists from the US as a part of his bid for world domination, opposed only by Doc Strange and his companion Virginia Thompson. All very exciting stuff in theory, but it all resolves into a kind of mush - it's not even as racist as it could be, which is good but not remarkable.

In the spirit of writing something interesting, here are the good parts of Kong's story: 

1. Location: Kong is the dictator of the Asian kingdom of Kachukuo, which was pretty fun to recognize as a stand-in for Manchukuo, the Chinese puppet-state established by the Japanese in 1932. I'm always chuffed to see Manchukuo come up both because it doesn't really do so very often and because I managed to get pretty far into adulthood before I learned about this entire country, and the joy of learning about it is still fresh in my mind. Not that the history of Manchukuo itself is particularly joy-inspiring, but learning is learning.

2. Rays. I like Kong's big chunky ray technology. He's got a red ray that brings the scientists out of the suspended animation he put them in for transport, a blue mind control ray (blue and red seem to come from the same machine) and a green death ray. What can I say, I like a ray, and I like colours.

3. Wild Hill Warriors. At one point Kong tries to get rid of Doc Strong by subjecting him to gladiatorial combat and I just really like the fact that he managed to scare up some Germanic warriors fresh from the sack of Rome for the task. They don't do very well but they're fun!

That's about it for Kong. Doc Strange inspires a revolution in Kachukuo, chucks the dictator into his own chemical soup and thaws out the scientists with a little Alosun, bish bash bosh, start the countdown to the next Fu Manchu knockoff showing up.

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)

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-VILLAIN 673: THE UNHOLY ONE

(Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

The Unholy One is the major antagonist of scientist-hero the Sky Wizard for three of his four appearances, although for the first two of those appearances he is present only as a voice on the radio directing his American agents Hawk Armand, Vera the Tigress and Butch (a fourth crook, Spud, doesn't make it past the first encounter with Sky Wizard). And here I must lay out my major problem with the Unholy One: he is a bad boss. He has set his agents a task - to acquire the plans to the Sky Wizard's new stratospheric jet plane - and no matter what progress they report toward that goal he yells at them and threatens to kill them. And they always have progress to report! If these three were managed well then I have little doubt that they could do the job set to them but the Unholy One does nothing but sow dissent and stress among his underlings.

The other big problem with the Unholy One is that he's just a boring Yellow Peril criminal mastermind who just kind of sits around in a secret Himalayan city telling his much more interesting henchmen (note the winged Himalayan Snow Man in the above image) to do things and threatening people with the Death of a Thousand Slashes, which ultimately turns out to be a room with a spiked ceiling that lowers and squashes/impales you.

The Unholy One ends his run by falling off of the Sky Wizard's flying island after an unsuccessful attempt to stab him to death and good riddance, I say.

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 002

Once again I present the worst that comics has to offer.

The Great Green Turtle:

The Great Green Turtle is just your standard Yellow Peril Chinatown ganglord, albeit one with a fantastic name. He does try to throw Sub-Zero, a man with ice powers, into a shark tank so we can safely say that he is not a villain with fantastic intelligence. His gem-smuggling ring gets thoroughly kiboshed. (Blue Bolt v1 004, 1940)

The Lama:

The Lama is a bandit chief, essentially, albeit one with a name from one religious tradition and henchmen - Thuggees, natch - from another. He hijacks a plantation and then gets beat up by aviator Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

The Fire God:

If there's one thing that Captain Kidd likes, it's finding lost explorers, so when a fellow named Benson goes missing he's off like a shot. He finds Benson about to be sacrificed to the Fire God, a masked figure who a well-placed kick reveals to be a Hitler lookalike in a mask (the Hitler thing is either a coincidence or just kind of meant to indicate generic megalomania in the Fire God's character). This one not only has a white guy easily convincing a group of credulous natives that he is a god but an instance of White People Vs Everyone else as Captain Kidd fruitlessly tries to get out of a sticky situation by playing the race card.

The Fire God ultimately meets his end in the classic writer's cop-out when they don't want to make their guy do a murder: he falls and hits his head on a rock after a sock to the jaw. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

Mad Ming:

Part of me wants to give Mad Ming some credit for not being as racist a Yellow Peril villain as someone like the Great Green Turtle, but he basically is and I am being tricked. Ming talks and dresses like a normal person and so all of his outrageous villainy is recontextualized, and maybe he would be worthy of reconsideration if all of his schemes and his henchmen and his nom de crime weren't still mired in the muck of the Oriental pulp villain, but as it stands he's just mildly better than his peers, racist stereotype-wise. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 571: THE YELLOW SPIDER

(Champion Comics 004, 1940)

Champion Comics 003 featured the murder of the Champ's mentor Dr Marlin and at the conclusion of that adventure the blame for Marlin's death seemed to rest squarely on the shoulders of his assistant Dr Katsu. Champion Comics 004, however, introduces a further development: Katsu was in fact working for a greater mastermind, the Yellow Spider!

(and here I'm going to contrast my usual delight at a villainous note signed with a little cartoon with my deep sighs as I say that yes, the Yellow in Yellow Spider is 100% a racist thing. Early Champion Comics issues are even more comfortable with using racist tropes for their villains than the rest of the comics industry, and that's saying something)

The Yellow Spider is big on indirect action. Beyond employing goons to do his dirty work he also uses engine-killing rays and cuts in on radio and telephone signals to orchestrate events at a distance, such as his successful kidnapping of the Champ here, followed by his doing a solid for the unnamed police officer who was supposed to be driving him around.

The Champ is brought to the Yellow Spider's dirigible/ base, where he eventually learns that the Spider is in fact this one little guy who has popped up a couple of times previously as an agent of what turns out to be himself. It's not explicit but quite possible he wants formula because he is puny (spoiler: much later it turns out that Dr Katsu pulled a double cross and had the formula all along. This Yellow Spider/ Champ beef is all a huge waste of everyone's time).

As the Champ was summarily evicted from the Yellow Spider's dirigible at the end of issue 4, Champion Comics 005 is almost entirely concerned with busywork. To whit:

-the Champ learns to fly a plane

-the Champ and his pal Bird Kelly attack the dirigible, too late remember about the engine killing ray and are knocked out of the sky

-the Champ travels back to Midwest University to talk to a ray expert

-the ray expert is stranded on a mountain; the Champ must go rescue him

-in consultation with the expert, the Champ crafts ray shielding for his plane

-the Champ and Bird Kelly go back up in a now-shielded plane

-the Champ STILL has to go on the dirigible and wreck the ray because it also explodes gunpowder and they only brought grenades for some reason

-the Champ hops back over to his plane and explodes the dirigible, killing the Yellow Spider

I will say that the Champ expressing some remorse over having killed an evil man (or at least not being up to watching the carnage) is a real departure for the Golden Age. Lotta righteous killing going on back then.