DOPE - $AX ROHMER (ADAPTED AS A COMIX BY TRINA ROBBINS)

Like most people born after 1900, I’m mostly familiar with Rohmer through his trickle-down influence on culture. While he didn’t whole cloth invent the “Yellow Menace” suite of stereotypes and cliches, his is the most enduring version. I’ve never read a Fu Manchu book but, like everyone else, I know the name (and the mustache, which I had for a while and people hated). Also, I’m partial to the Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul, one of half a dozen Fu Manchu rip-offs that litter pop-culture. I’m interested in Rohmer’s work as a sort of beginning of modern drug war scripts and cycles. The book itself I can review super quick: not that great. It suffers from the classic “originator problem” where it’s so influential and ubiquitous that it becomes hard to remember the cliches in this book aren’t really cliches, they’re the originals. Basically several viginal YT women, in upper-crust Victorian society fall under the spell of Sin Sin Wa, an evil Chinese drug dealer and his wife, Mrs. Sin, who is a Cuban-Jew. They get hooked on coke and hash and Veronal (I hadn’t heard of it either but it’s an old-timey barbiturate) and, of course, opium. Various police chiefs and inspectors and whatnot try to find the drug-kingpin before all of London’s beautiful young women are dead. It was actually mostly boring. The illustrations are good, though Kevin O’Neil is the king of Victorian looking/set comics (LOEG has a huge and acknowledged debt to Rohmer). Robbins really emphasizes the clothing, which looks great. The action and backgrounds are less well rendered. All that aside, it’s the stuff about the book at the end that’s most interesting. I didn’t know that London had the first Chinatown of a western city, called Limehouse (apparently destroyed in WWII), and it is interesting to chart the racism and stereotypes that came out of this. You need only turn on the news or listen to our president to see Chinese (or really any East Asian person) portrayed as sneaky or inscrutable or up to something. “He who looks at a Chinamen looks at an illusionist” comes straight from the book and you can imagine Trump saying it at a rally tomorrow. However, in the USA at least (and I assume England but I guess I don’t really know) EAs are no longer associated in the public mind with vice and drugs and crime. American assumptions around the Chinese now seem to largely focus around two opposing sexual stereotypes: men as unmasculine and nerdy and small-dicked. Smart but not leaders or charismatic (this particular storyline recently came up in that Harvard affirmative action case when it became clear that EA applicants were not scoring high on “leadership qualities” due to the racism of the admissions worker). Women are seen as subservient and young and innocent. I wonder if this has to do with our America’s love of outlaws and criminals. Deep down we think there’s sometimes cool and admirable in the you-can’t-tell-me-nothing-ness and get-it-by-any-means-ness of drug dealers and this didn’t square with a desire to see Chinese people as not sufficiently masculine and muscular and therefore not worthy of the status (and pay) of rugged YT westerners and rail-road workers. Not sure, just spitballing. It’s likewise telling that the narrative of a “drug kingpin” or one person responsible for all this addiction and sorrow. The book mirrors a real-life tragedy that really hits on all the tropes we see in drug war stories to this day. Billie Carleton was a young, beautiful actress and what we’d now call a socialite, who grew up poor but got some fame and leveraged it into relationships with powerful older men. She and these men and many upper-crust folks would slum in these new slums, dance and drink and try their drugs and have great stories to tell later. She died in the now classic manner, tons of coke and booze to party and stay up and look great, downers to go to sleep afterwards and help the coke wear off. Tale as old as time. People have been using opium and derivatives for 7k+ years. Likewise coca. What was new was the more powerful, industrial versions (powdered coke, Bayer-made Heroin, etc) and a press apparatus that could explode this into a national scandal and set a temple-plate we still use. Here rich friends were brought to court (mostly the court of public opinion since then, like now, actual judicial courts were not for the wealthy). They decided that their must be a king-pin. A criminal mastermind at the heart of the lurid Limehouse milieu. This book contains contemporaneous drawings of someone named “Brilliant Chang” which is a great drug lord name. All this stuff lasts to this day. It’s amazing. The final and cruelest irony this book calls to mind is how the Yellow Menace, drug-pushing, opium-enslaving asian person stereotype is a total inversion of actual relationship between England and China. Dope was published in 1919, the Second Opium War ended a generation before, in 1860. It sure seems like (fictional) fears about evil asian outsiders secretly pumping drugs into a society and destroying its moral fabric and subjugating it through addiction might maybe be displaced guilt from literally fighting an actual war for the right to pump a society full of drugs and destabilize it. All of British history is basically that Mittcell and Webb, “Are we the baddies” sketch. Lots to think about. Calls to mind that Jay-Z line from the Hell Yeah remix, “y’all don’t like that, do ya?/ you fucked up the hood, nigga, right back to ya”. 1919 racist wars.