Brought to life on the workbench of Victor Frankenstein, the Creature demonstrated superhuman intelligence and learning abilities immediately. Perhaps its most striking features is its yellow skin and strange eyes.The Shelley-Wollstoncroft Papers conclude with it being sighted on the Arctic wastes, heading northwards, presumably to self-destruction.
Fifty years later, the seas are ruled by the enigmatic 'Captain Nemo' who commands a self-manufactured vessel of astonishing capacity and power. He supplies revolutionaries, destroys warships, and broods over the rotting carcass of Grenville's Revenge.
Aronnax does not really supply much information but what he looks like beyond that he is tall, pale, and symmetrically constructed: he does note however that his eyes are unusually far apart.
Professor Aronnax's account ends with the professors escape from captivity; Nemo is assumed to have been destroyed in the Maelstrom whirlpools off the Norwegian coast. (The Mysterious Island appears to explain Nemo's origin and provide his concrete death, but is riddled with inconsistencies when compared to Aronnax's account. The most telling being that The Mysterious Island occurs in 1865 to 1867, while Aronnax definitively dates the Maelstrom event to June 2 1868! The Mysterious Island is disinformation. How much did the Creature pay Verne?)
In the 1890's, a tall , thin man calling himself 'Doctor Nikola' appears and there are reports of strange and terrible experiments and bizarre schemes in pursuit of a Tibetan process of raising the dead. Nikola is slender, 'perfectly formed' with strange eyes and 'white, toad-coloured skin' He has a pet black cat he calls Apollyon ( 'The Destroyer', also known classicly as Abaddon)
Twenty years later, a tall, 'yellow-complected' man with strange eyes, and commanding ever stranger scientific breakthroughs is revealed by the detective work of a Burmese police commissioner.
Calling himself 'Doctor Fu Manchu': a sobriquet as unrealistic as 'O'Irish' or 'MacScotsman' he masquerades as a vaudeville Chinaman with pigtail, lisp and inscrutable expressions. Fu Manchu mugs for the metaphorical camera, but the Clouseau-like Denis Nayland Smith can never see the joke, and swallows the masquerade hook, line and sinker. He is accompanied at all times by a creature described as a small black marmoset called Peko. This in itself is strange because Peko is the name of an Estonian god of brewing and crops.
At around this time, a dope-fiend by the name of Costigan reports a wild narrative involving a skeletal figure known as 'Old Skullface' 'Kathulos' or simply 'The Master' who was reputedly found drifting in a strange sealed sarcophagus in the Atlantic. I imagine that one of Nemo's strange, decked-over submersible dinghies could have been described as a 'sarcophagous'. Costigan's opium addiction is cured by the administration of a powerful stimulant that converts a weak and dying addict into a physical powerhouse. It does not entirely cure his mind; the climax of his account features a hallucinogenic dream centered around a Mesoamerican pyramid built deep in the heart of London.
In 1946, a tall, thin man calling himself 'Jonas Sown' claims to have 'come out of China' and to have instigated the second world war.
The trail grows cold here.
If the Sown lead is actually unconnected - and the connection is very tenuous - than the Creature perished at some point during the Second World War. He would have been around 130 years old, but we have no data on the ageing rate of artificial beings.
No trace of the Nautilus has ever been found, yet in 1963 the US Navy tracked a single-screwed submarine operating at depths and speeds no other submarine has ever reached.
In 1972, the Norwegian Navy was involved in a two week long battle with a small cigar-shaped submarine that ultimately escaped unscathed.
So where is the Creature today?
Showing posts with label Fu Manchu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fu Manchu. Show all posts
Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage...
Jess Nevins has a interesting overview of what he describes as a historical backlash against the
ideals of physical development that spawned Clark Savage Jr., and his varied companions of the pulps.
"Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders,"
While this provides some realworld relevance to the slow decline of Doc's capabilities over the years - especially post WWII - this paper suggested something much more sinister to me.
The question of where Savage went can also be asked about Kent Allard (Lamont Cranston - the Shadow),Richard Wentworth (the Spider), Carson Napier, or Anthony Quinn(the Black Bat).
Were they hunted down and destroyed?
Philip Jose Farmer has suggested that Savage disappeared during a expedition through the 'Gate of Hell' cave system near Quoddy Bay, but its pretty clear that the Russians got him: Terror Wears No Shoes ends on a uncharacteristically down note:
ideals of physical development that spawned Clark Savage Jr., and his varied companions of the pulps.
"Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders,"
While this provides some realworld relevance to the slow decline of Doc's capabilities over the years - especially post WWII - this paper suggested something much more sinister to me.
The question of where Savage went can also be asked about Kent Allard (Lamont Cranston - the Shadow),Richard Wentworth (the Spider), Carson Napier, or Anthony Quinn(the Black Bat).
Were they hunted down and destroyed?
Philip Jose Farmer has suggested that Savage disappeared during a expedition through the 'Gate of Hell' cave system near Quoddy Bay, but its pretty clear that the Russians got him: Terror Wears No Shoes ends on a uncharacteristically down note:
" Doc Savage had replaced the virus charged money packets in the suitcase, and was inspecting them carefully with a magnifying glass.
He turned his head, said, "You'd better tell them to quarantine this suite and all the prisoners. Have them shut off the air conditioning so air from this place won't be circulated through the ship."
Canta,shocked by how pale his face was, asked, "Do you think any of the packets broke open?" "I don't think so. But we'll take no chances."
"You mean we have to remain in here for the rest of the voyage?"
"That's right. And then we'll have to be segregated for several weeks afterward. That won't be so bad--we'll be in the mountains somewhere, at a laboratory that we'll set up to find out what this virus is and dig up a vaccine or treatment."
"Can that be done?"
"It can be tried," he said. "Go on, tell them to keep everyone out of here, and keep the prisoners in the suite."
She frowned at him. He seemed detached, absorbed in the matter of solving the virus that lay ahead. There was no visible elation about him, and certainly no noticeable interest in her as a woman, and a very pretty one.
Canta felt an odd, helpless sort of rage.
She turned and went out and stood by the suite door, listening to the Captain of the Crosby Square tell expert lies to his curious passengers.
THE END "
Canta,shocked by how pale his face was, asked, "Do you think any of the packets broke open?" "I don't think so. But we'll take no chances."
"You mean we have to remain in here for the rest of the voyage?"
"That's right. And then we'll have to be segregated for several weeks afterward. That won't be so bad--we'll be in the mountains somewhere, at a laboratory that we'll set up to find out what this virus is and dig up a vaccine or treatment."
"Can that be done?"
"It can be tried," he said. "Go on, tell them to keep everyone out of here, and keep the prisoners in the suite."
She frowned at him. He seemed detached, absorbed in the matter of solving the virus that lay ahead. There was no visible elation about him, and certainly no noticeable interest in her as a woman, and a very pretty one.
Canta felt an odd, helpless sort of rage.
She turned and went out and stood by the suite door, listening to the Captain of the Crosby Square tell expert lies to his curious passengers.
THE END "
Italics mine.
'shocked by how pale his face was ' Savage pale with terror was a new development. I'm going to have to re-read this book to see if anything can be adduced to suggest that the Commie-spy-spreads-plague plot was actually a plot to catch the Man of Bronze. After all, everything else had failed over the years: poison and bullets, monsters and beautiful assassins.
I've often wondered how Savage never encountered the eponymous villain Dr. Fu Manchu, although the strange entity answering to the name of Jonas Sown might well have been the Master himself.
Could Dr. Fu Manchu, (most certainly not his real name) been the surreiptious destroyer of the early twenty-century's crop of posthumans? Being apparently immortal, he could undertake schemes that would span decades, centuries even. Being subtle, he could have turned the concept of superhumanity or posthumanity into a laughable comic book idea of capes, tights and Krypton.
And now, behind a spiderweb of international banks, world-ruling corporations, and a global-marketplace of confusion and incomprehensible wealth, does the Master rule?
Its easy to argue that the superheros destroyed the supervillians before they faded away, but no one can explain what happened to the singular greatest of the villains; tall, lean, with strange green eyes and commanding unknown sciences, the One known as Doctor Fu Manchu (known to be a pseudonym) or Kathulos or Dr. Nikola and possibly before that simply as the Creature, must still walk amongst us.
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