Tag Archives: Fu Manchu

Skook Words (and Pictures) #28

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Friday stumbles over the horizon, dazed and wobbly. Is today the right day? Is it really Friday? Or has Thursday lingered over, an unwelcome, obstinate guest? Perhaps Saturday has arrived early and will spin Friday around and away for another week?

Nah. That’s Friday alright. Friend to some. Enemy to others. Simply another day of the week in cultures that don’t give the days names.

The Next Five

Last week, over on Facebook, Jason Levine nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character.

So I did. I just posted covers on Facebook but here I’m giving a little context to my choices. I wrote about the first five in last Friday’s newsletter. The next five are below:

6. The Spirit


I read the Spirit in black and white reprints published first by Warren Magazines, then Kitchen Sink Press. The stories were original published in color in weekly installments of Sunday newspapers. It’s a brilliant series with a lot of creative storytelling, layouts and design. (And racism. Sigh.) There have been a few attempts to revive the character but none of the new versions have lasted.

7. Modesty Blaise


I spent a lot of time in the library as a kid. I made it a habit to go there regularly and read The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The comics page. I’m sure I read other parts of the paper upon occasion but it was always the comics that I came to read. If I missed a day the library kept copies of the previous week’s issues easily available. The Chronicle ran the daily Modesty Blaise comic strip. The library also had copies of some of the Modesty Blaise novels. I forget which I discovered first.

8. Den


I read the first 15 pages of Den in the trade paperback Ariel in the same little bookstore that I used to visit to get my comics as a kid. The art blew me away. At the time I couldn’t afford the book. Discovering the extended series later in Heavy Metal magazine further warped me and made me a fan of Richard Corben for life.

9. Zot


Zot! was a fun series. A mix of silly and serious. Not much to say beyond that.

10. Shang Chi


I’m not sure which was the first issue of Master of Kung Fu that I purchased. It’s not this one. I picked this one because it features Paul Gulacy’s art. That’s what attracted me to the series to begin with. Doug Moench’s writing kept me engaged until the series was canceled with issue #125.

The Process

Here’s this week’s process GIF –

Subscriptions Delayed

I’d written last week’s newsletter and scheduled it for publication at the usual time. And then I went poking around in WordPress (this site runs on WordPress) to see if I could find the 530 subscribers that my subscription form claimed I had. In the process I did something that removed the emailing function from my posts. I haven’t had time to dig in a figure out exactly what I did. Apologies to anyone who had to come here to read rather than get this newsletter in their email. I will get it fixed.

And, no, I wasn’t able to find the list of 530 subscribers. Maybe my website is hallucinating.

I hope your week goes well. May you experience joy. May you get rest.

See you in seven!

Tuesday Night Beach Party Club #12

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Artstuff

I have only seen two of the horror movies released the year I was born. The Last Man on Earth was one. The Horror of Party Beach was the other. Interesting, both movies feature untraditional vampires. Last Man’s vampires are dead humans who have been reanimated by a virus. The Party Beach‘s vampires are the corpses of drowned fishermen who have been reanimated by radioactive waste and transformed into weird fishman zombies. Last Man stars Vincent Price and helped to inspire The Night of the Living Dead and therefore a ridiculous number of zombie movies, comics and tv shows. Party Beach features silly looking monsters, a surprising amount of gore and is generally pretty dumb.

Guess which movie has infested my imagination?

Yeah.

The monsters in The Horror of Party Beach are atomic fishman zombie vampires, mutated sea anemonies that have somehow animated human skeletons. The costumes in the movie are inspiring. Inspiring like – “I’ve got a better idea!” So over the years I’ve done a few illustrations featuring redesigns of the critters. The following gallery collects a sampling of the best of them.

I’m not the only person to have put way too much thought into making these beasties look cool.

This is Dope Pope’s Horror of Party Beach Gallery. My icthyozombies are meant to be odd combinations of oceanic life in humanoid form. Dope Pope’s design is streamlined and naturalistic. I applaud his results!

Story Seed #36

The Memoirs of Doctor Fu Manchu

I like Fu Manchu. Not Fu Manchu as he has been depicted. That Fu Manchu is a horrible racist caricature. There’s a version of Fu Manchu in my imagination who has a much more interesting story than the one presented so far.

My direct exposure to the character is limited to his appearances as the main villain (and father to the main character) in the Master of Kung Fu comic and to his appearance (as portrayed by Boris Karloff) in the movie The Mask of Fu Manchu. I’ve haven’t read the original novels. I haven’t watched any of the other films. The Fu Manchu in Master of Kung Fu is a villain who got tiresome due to repeated exposure. He showed up and got defeated. Over and over. The Fu Manchu and his daughter, Fah Lo Suee, in Mask are the only characters having fun. I like to see villains who enjoy their work.

By the time I saw Mask I’d also gotten an education in European/Chinese relations, particularly in the imperialist villainy committed by European nations against the Chinese. Fu Manchu’s gripes against the British had historic justification. Having the British characters mostly be portrayed as smug assholes didn’t help me sympathize with them. And knowing that, at the time the movie was filmed, I was expected to sympathize with their smug assholishness really doesn’t help me sympathize with Western imperialist culture.

Fu Manchu is a genius. He’s lived many lifetimes. He’s a scientist and a mystic. He’s a man of his word. He’s got his own secret cults and organizations. He’s got loyal and treacherous family members to aid and oppose him. Imagine the stories he could tell. Imagine how those stories would read if told from his point of view. The name Fu Manchu is still trademarked by the Sax Rohmer estate but the original novels, and therefore the character himself, are in public domain. One could write a novel from the Good Doctors perspective. One probably couldn’t title it The Memoirs of Dr. Fu Manchu without getting into legal trouble with Rohmer’s lawyers.

And, in this, the second decade of the 21st Century, one couldn’t publish The Memoirs of Dr. Fu Manchu without getting a lot of flack from the audience. One could write a brilliant, aware and nuanced portrait of the character and a lot of folks would be pissed off. The name, Fu Manchu, calls up all the prejudice and ignorance of “Yellow Peril” fiction, of “yellowface” performances, of Orientalist fantasy and propaganda. Some characters are products of their time and cannot be revived or reformed. Not by a European writer, no matter how well intentioned. It’s a bad idea.

If there were Asian fans of Fu Manchu, one of them might be able to write the character without being reviled. If. I’ve done quite a few online searches but the only praise I find for the character comes from white guys.

Other Newsletters

Abundance Insider by Peter Diamandis proviides a regular sources of good news about technological advances in the world. Too often our news is a litany of disasters so it’s refreshing to get word of things that are going well, that give a glimpse of an improving civilization.

Lifestuff

I hope you and you and everyone you know are doing well. I’ve got a skewed picture of what’s happening because I’m still working. I don’t have any more to time to look at the news than I did before the crisis. Mail delivery is considered an essential service. So I go to work. I keep my distance from other employees while I’m putting my route together and then the job continues like it has for years. I didn’t see many people during the day before. I don’t see many people now. I keep a greater distance if I have conversations with customers but the conversations are no shorter than previously because they were never long before. When I’m working I’m trying to get done.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay sane. See you next week!

The Good Doctor – Black and White

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FuManchuBWWhat the hell, I thought, I’ll draw Fu Manchu. Not because I’m a fan. He just seemed fun to draw.

My exposure to the character of Fu Manchu is pretty limited. I’ve had to two experiences with him.

I first encountered him in the original Master of Kung Fu comic book series. The protagonist, Shang Chi, is the son of Fu Manchu. He discovered that his father was evil and so turned against him. Fu Manchu is THE villain for most of the early issues in the series and, frankly, I got tired of him. He was a bad guy who wore out his welcome.

I met him again a few years ago when I watched The Mask of Fu Manchu. I watched the movie because Boris Karloff was playing Fu Manchu and I wanted to see how he pulled it off. A friend of mine describes the film as “charmingly racist” and, from my whiteboy viewpoint, I would agree. Fu Manchu is portrayed as evil but, it seems to me, he had a good reason to hate white folks. The white protagonists are dull, smug and sure of their superiority. Fu Manchu might be a bad guy but he had style and imagination. I got the impression that Fu Manchu had once tried to fit in with Westerners and was rejected merely because he wasn’t white. I enjoyed the movie.

Neither version of Fu Manchu, however, was compelling enough to me to make me want to seek out the original novels or see any other films. As far as I know, the character has only been gotten yellowface portrayals by white actors. Maybe if an Asian actor played him, in a film written and directed by Asian, I’d give the character another try.