A PAUSE FOR CLAWS

At the end of my YELLOW CLAW review, I said:

...in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

What "racial myth?" The one I suggested in my 2016 review of the first story that introduced "Shang-Chi, son of Fu Manchu." In part I focused upon not one but two racial myths represented by the debut cover.

Of the depiction of Fu Manchu I said:

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Now, though I reviewed all of Rohmer's Fu Manchu books in recent years, I wasn't specifically checking to see when if at all the early books showed the devil-doctor with either pointed ears or claw-fingers, nor have I checked to see whether or not the early covers for the books utilize such iconography. But there's not much question that the 1915 YELLOW CLAW does use the latter image to signify its barely-seen villain "Mister King."

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

 

And later in the same novel:

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him.

So whether Rohmer or any other predecessor used the "Asian claw" motif, it's definitely there in the 1915 CLAW novel. Rohmer's "Mister King" is not that memorable a villain, being nothing but a mundane drug-dealer, and so he cannot be said to share the "aristocratic" background attributed to Fu Manchu. But since he doesn't have a background of any kind, readers also can't see him as anything but a vague spectre of evil. In the second King section, Gaston Max thinks of King in this way:

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Did Rohmer really mean to suggest that King was "a Thing," like something out of Lovecraft (or even a Robert E. Howard rewriting of HPL?) Nothing in Rohmer would support such a thesis. But his visual focus on King as a pair of nearly disembodied yellow hands has a certain mythic appeal. It suggests that King's "hold" over London's criminal demimonde also constitutes a "stranglehold" upon the daylight world of London, inhabited by sensible Brits. 

Though Rohmer gives King a racial connotation, the image of "evil hands" is certainly not CONFINED to Asian characters. One year before the publication of YELLOW CLAW, the American serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE debuted a character that some scholars consider to be "cinema's first mystery-villain"-- and this character, The Clutching Hand, was also visually characterized as little more than a disembodied pair of evil hands, at least until the final chapter's reveal.

Now, I mentioned in the YELLOW CLAW review that most Marvel Comics fan only know one character named "Yellow Claw"-- though even that reference is qualified by the fact that this 1956 character wasn't the first of his comic-book kind. Instead, in 1942 we see the company's first Yellow Claw, who battles Captain America and Bucky with his "petals of doom." Neither the original story nor GCD attributes a name to the writer, though it's possible that editor Stan Lee wrote it. (Lee served in the Army Signal Corps from 1942 to 1945 but stated that he continued mailing scripts to his company during that period.) 

The second page definitely utilizes the "clutching yellow claw" image:

Lee certainly could have derived the name of this villain from having read or even just seen Rohmer's novel. However, nowhere in the story is it explicitly stated that the Claw is any sort of Asian. Here's his first clear depiction from page ten:

The Claw is mostly colored Caucasian, and he doesn't have slanted eyes, though the fanglike teeth were typical for negative Asian depictions. Only his hands are yellow, but no one in the story comments on this anomaly. The villain is given no solid motive for sending poisonous flowers to members of the U.S. military. Why not make him Japanese, since the country was at war with that Asian country? But this would have conflicted with the big reveal: that the blonde-haired villain is actually a previously introduced Caucasian, one "Captain Elliott." Maybe his hands only turned yellow from working with poisons? It's worth remembering that Fu Manchu, unlike Mister King, makes frequent reference to using flowers to produce sedatives.

I doubt Stan Lee, even if he scripted this weird story, consciously remembered the character when he greenlighted the 1956 YELLOW CLAW comic book. Still, maybe he suggested to the book's scripter the use of the name for the title villain, recalling less the Captain America tale than the Rohmer title. And throughout the first issue, Yellow Claw, unlike Mister King, emulates the established iconography of Fu Manchu, who I believe did have in some depictions excessively long (and hence aristocratic) fingernails. None of the other Asians in the first issue are given any exaggerated features, so Yellow Claw is also imposing, as the cover copy says, because he's something hard to identify: "who-- or what-- is he?"

I had planned to work in a reference to the Yellow Claw's quasi-revival in the 1960s, but now I think I may give that revival separate attention in a future essay.