Confession time: I am a sucker for Sax Rohmer's stories of oriental menace. Heck, I'm a fan of the Yellow Peril overall, from tales of Fu Manchu to the pulp stories about the Mysterious Wu Gang to stories by Achmed Abdullah and Thomas Burke's Limehouse. They are the remnants of a time long gone and catered to the stereotypes of the day, but I do enjoy them. Conversely, I find most tales from the same period depicting stereotypical Blacks to be off-putting (Octavus Roy Cohen's Florian Slappy stories ,for example). Go figure. Does this make me a racist?
Anyway, I am a big Fu Manchu fan. I enjoyed the books, the movies, the comics, and was more than will to forgive the execrable television show of the 50s.
Britain's Super-Detective [sometimes hyphenated, sometimes, not] Library was a twice-monthly comic book from Amalgamated Press; it ran for 188 issues from April 1953 to December 1960. [They also issued such long-running titles as Cowboy Picture Library, Thriller Comics, Schoolgirls Picture Library, and War Picture Library.] Most issues offered a full-length adventure of various detectives, many taken from popular books -- The Saint, Bulldog Drummond, Sexton Blake, Sherlock Holmes, Blackshirt; other were from comic books characters (some created for the series) -- Buck Ryan, Rip Kirby, Leslie Shane, the space detective Rick Random; other issues adapted stories from popular thriller authors such as Vincent Canning. As far as I can tell, only one issue adapted a Fu Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer.
According to Rohmer himself, he embarked on the Fu Manchu tales after a Ouija board spelled out C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N when he asked it what would make his fortune. That's a great story for publicity purposes, I suppose/
The Island of Fu Manchu (1941) was Rohmer's tenth novel in the series. It is 1941 and the United States has just entered the worldwide conflict. From his hidden lair in the Caribbean, Fu Manchu decides to upset the balance of power by issuing naval assaults. Employing both his vast scientific knowledge and his diabolical skills, Fu Manchu combines advance technology and mysticism for his attacks. It's up to Nayland Smith to stop him. Smith follows Fu Manchu's trail from London to New York to the Panama Canal and, finally, to the voodoo-haunted island of Haiti. [Please note that no household pets were eaten in either the book or the comic book.]
Interesting artwork by Phil; Mendoza.
Enjoy.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=95804&comicpage=&b=i
I'm a huge fan of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series, too! I remember reading Fu Manchu in a Study Hall in 1964 whenI should have been doing my Geometry homework!
ReplyDeleteAnd knowing geometry never helped you, George, but knowing the organizational structure of the Si Fan surely did.
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