The Comics of Fu Manchu

Fu Manchu is one of the great villains of Pulp fiction. Sax Rohmer created the character in Collier’s Magazine, Feb 15, 1913 with “The Zayat Kiss”. Collier’s was a slick, but the Pulps copied Fu repeatedly in stories “Skull-Face” (Weird Tales, October-December 1929) by Robert E. Howard and “Hawk Carse” by Anthony Gilmore. Like Tarzan, Zorro and Captain Blood, he is an icon from the beginning of the 20th Century. Fu is an important link in the chain that connects Sherlock Holmes to James Bond. Without Fu you don’t get Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. Fu Manchu’s slow fading from popular culture is partly due to no new films since 1980. The racist nature of the original and the iconic “super-villain” status makes the character unlikely today.

The story of Fu Manchu were a natural for comic strips in the 1930s with many film versions. The first and second novels were adapted and drawn by Leo O’Mealia for the Bell Syndicate. The strip premiered on Monday, April 20, 1931 to Friday 30 March 1934. These strips would be compiled and reprinted in comic book form.

DC Comics ran the comic strip in Detective Comics four years later. Detective Comics wasn’t all about Batman in the early days but offered a number of crime busters including Speed Saunders, Oscar the Gumshoe, Cosmo, the Phantom of Disguise, Larry Steele, Bruce Nelson, Steve Malone and Slam Bradley. Nayland Smith and Doctor Petrie fit right in. The reprint segments began in Detective Comics #17, July 1938 and ran to #28, June 1939.

The Drums of Fu Manchu (1940) was a Republic serial starring Henry Brandon as Fu. It was the ninth film version of the character. The serial was adapted as a movie comic with each episode summarized in three pages of comics and published in newspapers. Towards the end, the photo idea must have proven a poor choice because the last portions were drawn by a cartoonist.

Avon Comics brought out The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1951. The author of the adaptation of the fifth novel is not known but the artwork was done by Wally Wood and Joe Orlando. As with the novels and films, much is made of the romance between Fu’s slave girl Karamaneh and Dr. Petrie.

The British got in on the action in August 1953 with the tenth novel, The Island of Fu Manchu in Super Detective Library #9. The Rohmer novel was adapted by Rex Hardinge with art by Philip Mendoza. This storyline seems like a cross between a lost race novel and primitive Science Fiction but is actually a World War II espionage deal.

In 1962 to 1973 a French newspaper Le Parisien Libéré ran a new comic strip and Fu returned to the newspapers. These strips were written by Juliette Benzoni and drawn by Robert Bressy. They were collected in albums as well as reprinted by Caliber Comics in the US.

The last appearance we will worry ourselves with here is a secondary character role in Marvel’s Shang-Chi comics including The Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu and The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.  Shang-Chi’s and Fu make their first appearance in Special Marvel Edition #15 (December 1973) but Marvel had to drop the Fu material for copyright reasons. The film version Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) never makes any mention of Fu. (Which is fine, since dragging in old stereotypes is hardly what the film wanted to do.)

Conclusion

Fu Manchu hasn’t disappeared completely since 1977. He made an appearance in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and elsewhere. Fu and characters like Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Phantom Detective, The Avenger, Zorro, Tarzan, Dracula,etc. need re-inventing every few decades. This process is necessary because what they represent as characters changes.

Take Superman, for instance. The Man of Steel has been around since 1938. The flying man from Krypton in the latest film, last played by Henry Cavill, is a far cry from the more detective-like Superman of Siegel and Shuster. Those two original creators wanted to make a detective who had some amazing powers. Today, Superman is about facing off against super-villains. The scenes in Man of Steel (2013) with buildings collapsing under the attack of Zod (like the falling buildings of 2012’s The Avengers) speaks more about 9-11 than it does 1938.

Fu Manchu may be up for such a re-vamp. Or he may fade (as we have seen James Bond struggle of late, unsure what to be in the 21st Century.) This happens too. Characters can become irrelevant, problematic or simply too old-fashioned for re-use. Instead of becoming a stylish new Fu, we may have to satisfy ourselves with small memories like that mustache appearing on a new character.

And then there is parody. Some character may come along that is meant to make fun of old Fu like Mike Meyers’ Dr. Evil. This requires some recollection of the great bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who may have borrowed his haircut from Fu) and other Bond villains of the 1960-1980s. Do you remember enough about Fu Manchu to poke fun at him? It may be too late already.

The third Wild Inc novel, Madame Murder, available next month!