Here is an unusual pulp comic: an adaptation of Sax Rohmer‘s novel Dope (1919) done by Trina Robbins that appeared in the early 1980s and was reprinted in hardback by IDW in 2017.
I had read the comic when it first appeared in anthologies published by Eclipse Comics and wasn’t aware that it had been reprinted.
Sax Rohmer (1883-1959), actually Arthur Henry “Sarsfield” Ward, is best known for Fu Manchu, the sinister Chinese villain. But he wrote a lot more, including several other series featuring detectives such as Gaston Max, Paul Harley, Morris Klaw, and the Crime Magnet. There is also the Sumuru series, with a sort of “female Fu Manchu.”
Dope is actually the first staring Chief Inspector Red Kerry of Scotland Yard. There are three further stories with him. The story was inspired by a real incident at the time, the death by drug overdose of Billie Carleton, a young English actress in 1918. The novel plays up the “yellow peril” themes and fears about both Chinese and opium dens at the time. And as was typical of the period and of Rohmer, all the Chinese are shown as sinister caricatures.
Trina Robbins (1938-2024) was a well-known American comic artist who emerged out of the underground comix movement. She later wrote or co-wrote several non-fiction works such as Women and the Comics (1985), A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), and The Great Women Superheroes (1996). I always thought that something similar about the women writers, artists, and editors of the pulps would be great.
Her version of Dope was first serialized in Eclipse Magazine #2-8 from 1981 to 1983, and concluded in Eclipse Monthly #1-3. Eclipse Monthly was a color comic, but I don’t recall if Dope was colored.
The story is your typical one of a young woman, Rita Irvin, falling into the clutches of evil and opium. The villains of the tale are the one-eyed Sin Sin Wa and his wife. Red Kerry gets involved and, after many escapades, finds and rescues Rita from their clutches.
The edition from IDW is pretty good. There is a foreword that is silly. I think too many people overuse the term “trash” to describe pulp fiction. Trina provides an introduction, which tells how this work came about. But sorry, Trina, not all people in the past were racists, sexists, etc. I find that a tiresome view of too many people. Colleen Doran gives a nice afterword.
More interesting is the long essay with sidebars at the end by Jon B. Cooke of Comic Book Artist magazine. Here he delves into Rohmer, the novel, and the time period. We get sidebars on the Red Kerry stories, the other drugs used at the time, Limehouse in London, and Fu Manchu. Frankly, this essay was for me as much as a reason to get this volume as to get a reprint of Dope.
So look for a copy. You might find it available fairly inexpensively if you look. I think the combination of the comic adaptation and Cooke’s essay makes it worth getting.
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