PROVING YOU HAVE THE CHOP-CHOPS

Probably the last time I addressed the matter of ethnic sidekicks in the comics was my 2015 essay INCORRECTLY CORRECT. I noted in part that, because it's traditional for hero's sidekicks to use bad English and to have homely faces (the better to make the hero look good), it wasn't necessarily racist for an author to use an ethnic character who either used bad English, looked funny, or both.

That said, though I have a strong liking for the BLACKHAWK comics-feature, at least during the early 1940s, the character of the Blackhawk team's "mascot" Chop-Chop proves a bit of a strain. Chop-Chop's fractured English is not nearly as tortured as that of Milton Caniff's "Connie," as I mentioned in the earlier essay. Still, when one sees the original, pint-sized, pigtail-wearing Chinese character running around with amidst the tall, chiseled-jaw Caucasian heroes, it's hard not to think that Chop-Chop is being ridiculed for both his height and his foreign-ness. I would part company with the ultraliberals who would claim that ANY such depiction is automatic evidence of racism. For me, the *continuous* nature of this particular "sidekick-trope" is more worrisome.

Here's the character in his first comics in MILITARY COMICS #3, where he looks more transparently like a dupe of Caniff's Connie, in that he wears a similar hat and is not overly fat, but he seems to be far more dim-witted than the Caniff character.

Within a few months, Chop-Chop took on his more familiar portly shape, plus his signature weapon: a large meat-cleaver, though I doubt he ever actually used it to chop human opponents.

This version of the character persisted into the very late years of Quality Comics' run of the BLACKHAWK comic. In addition to providing comic relief in the Blackhawks' adventures, Chop-Chop appeared in his own solo strip, which was always oriented on buffoonish comedy. Here's the first page of the next-to-last solo Chop-Chop tale from BLACKHAWK #94, slightly redeemed by the excellent art of Paul Gustavson.

In the very next issue, Chop-Chop is less cartoonish in the lead adventure in BLACKHAWK #95 (1956), wherein the heroes contend with a Chinese lady pirate, one Madam Fury. It's noteworthy that all of the other Chinese characters in the story are drawn realistically, and that even Chop-Chop has lost some of his bigfoot characteristics.

Oddly, this issue also sports the last of the solo Chop-Chop stories, and for what is probably the first time, he's missing his trademark pigtail, though it's present in all of the Blackhawks stories within that issue.

The next issue, #96,  is the first to totally abandon both Chop-Chop's pigtail and his solo feature, which is replaced, for the remainder of the Quality BLACKHAWK run, by stories about wartime conflict. He does continue to wear his traditional "coolie costume" while the other Blackhawks all wear their blue outfits.

As for the character's infamous hatchet, I didn't study all of the Qualities leading up to issue #96, but I did see the weapon present in some of the early 1950s tales. While the early Chop-Chop usually fought criminals in comic ways, like bonking them on the head, the version from #96 on uses his fists as ably as any Blackhawk, even though he's still short, rotund, and a mangler of English. Plainly some editor decided to update the Chinese Blackhawk's image for some reason. The changes to Chop-Chop may be connected to the eventual sale of the BLACKHAWK property to DC about a year later. Alternately, the alterations may have come about if someone who administered the Comics Code took a dim view of this sort of ethnic humor.

DC Comics took over the magazine with issue #107, and Chop-Chop stayed roughly the same for some years. The biggest change was that under editor Whitney Ellsworth, the stories emphasized science fiction and costumed villains far more than real-world political threats. After scanning a number of these, my blanket conclusion is that the English-mangling was gone by the late 1950s, but that Chop-Chop was just sort of "there," neither funny nor particularly dynamic. Only in 1964-- long after Jack Schiff had assumed editorial duties-- did Chop-Chop finally abandon his traditional "coolie colors," when issue #197 decided to give all of the Blackhawks red-and-black uniforms. In this issue he evidently took a "slenderizing" course, for now he looks as good as the rest of the heroes, except, of course, for being a shorty.

Issue #203 then gave Chop-Chop an origin-story that explained his name as connected to his martial-arts prowess, in keeping with American pop culture's growing enthusiasm for Oriental fighting-styles. Here he's seen defeating the hulking Stanislaus.

I don't know whether or not later versions of the Chop-Chop pleased comics fans or not. At any rate, 1964 marks the death knell of the "Chinese mascot" trope from the Golden Age series. I was raised on the BLACKHAWK of the 1960s, which always consisted of very ordinary formula-stories. But even though the Golden Age stories feature a more freewheeling, pulpish form of adventure, I certainly don't mourn the passing of buck-toothed, English-mangling Chop-Chop-- which may be about the only good thing ever to come of DC's Silver Age BLACKHAWK.