I'd already done one of my two mythcomics posts for this month when I realized that May was "Asian American and Pacific Islander" month. Thus, even though I despise the banal concept of representation as it's constructed by ultraliberals, I wondered, "what could I come up with in these categories?"
I've done three or four posts on Marvel's MASTER OF KUNG FU, and dozens of posts on Japanese manga, but none of these characters are "Asian American." I glanced at a list of Asian superheroes, and it included Damian Wayne, who got some "representation" in my review of DEMON STAR. However, that one seems a stretch. Damian is a quarter-Arab, and does anyone deem any denizens of North Africa to be "Asian" any more? Seems like the furthest west one could start might be Turkey. Mantis got a "near myth" review, but her father was German and her mother Vietnamese. I've read a substantial number of the Cassandra Cain BATGIRL stories but not with a mind to seeking out mythicity. Some potential there, maybe.
Pacific Islanders, particularly those who are either born as or sworn in to be Americans, are not going to be very populous, much less myth-friendly. In the Golden Age Ajax-Farrell published a half dozen issues of SOUTH SEA GIRL, about a Polynesian princess, Alani, who defended her hidden island from intruders, but I read these and didn't get much out of them. A Silver Age back-up feature from Gold Key, JET DREAM AND HER STUNT-GIRL COUNTERSPIES, included a native Polynesian beauty named Ting-a-Ling, but these are all very simple action-tales with no conceptual depth. The "Conner Kent" version of Superboy had a Hawaiian girlfriend, and Marvel has a couple of Polynesian heroes I know nothing about, but I'd probably do better looking for anthology horror-tales like this one.
"Drums of Doom," drawn by that titan of jungle-girl comics Matt Baker, almost certainly started as an inventory story for SOUTH SEA GIRL, only to be rewritten, and maybe partly re-penciled, as a horror story. The first page introduces the reader to two Polynesian principals: Moltane, a drum-maker possessed of arcane knowledge, and "that she-devil Adana," who covets Moltane's power. Given the similarity of name and general appearance, "Adana" almost certainly started out as "Alani" but got reworked into a secondary villainess here. Don't ask me why all the Polynesian characters are colored charcoal-grey.
A white interloper named Pierre has heard that Moltane's drums can confer eternal life, so he suborns Adana's help to take on the sorcerer. Note, in the page above, that an old native woman warns that death can travel on wings just like Pierre's plane.
In the next few pages Adana and Pierre are captured very easily by Moltane's forces. The sorcerer condemns the trespassers to death, but Pierre turns the tables, killing both his enemy and his ally. This page is almost certainly original to the story, since Alani was a continuing character and would not have been knocked off as she is here. Pierre does get hold of a magical drum, but in the badly constructed, hurry-up-and-get-it-done conclusion, the drum just spells his doom. It's a pretty bad story, distinguished only by the Baker art, the curious linkage to SOUTH SEA GIRL, and the fact that Moltane (who doesn't really do anything evil, given that he's defending himself against invaders) stands as the real star of the story, managing to curse Pierre even from the grave.
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