Fu Manchu's son
Fu Manchu's son, sometimes called "Johnny Kebab", was a late 19th century crime lord and CEO of the White Peacock Arms Company.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
He was created by his father Fu Manchu in the 1870s in an attempt to make a perfect heir. This involved significant experimentation on his mother during her pregnancy, with the result that the child was born both fireproof and disfigured.
As a youth, he started from the bottom of the underworld hierarchy by serving as a "fag" for a gang-lord of Limehouse, during which he earned the nickname "Johnny Kebab". Joseph Merrick was among his childhood friends.
He also became the youngest initiate of the Parisian l'Academie Sinistaire, following which he was appointed head of one of his father's facilities for biological experimentation. There he pioneered cosmetics with the Hydra Energetic balm. He also used the facilities to create Big Jim McTumour and the Cancer Gang to kill John Wayne.
He used time travel to seek a love in the future. These attempts were unsuccessful except for brief affairs with Heather Mills and a far-future half-mer-creature who was really a dolphin. His other time travel expeditions included a visit with Bernard Bresslaw to a 1946 address of Muslim and Hindu preachers in India by the Mahatma, and a trade mission for the White Peacock Syndicate to 1974 Uganda, during which he taught Idi Amin "Evil Ventriloquism".
However, he was expelled from l'Academie and his father's criminal empire after being found guilty of a "Leaving Alone Things That Man Was Meant to Meddle In" due to a clerical error by the Man with the Child in His Eyes. Seeking fortunes elsewhere, he signed with the British military and served under General Gordon in the Sudan for a few weeks before transferring to British Intelligence, for whom he spent 18 months investigating the activities of Dr Moreau in Africa. This investigation led to the Um Bongo report.
He also became involved in the affair of the White Iscariot, which convinced him to follow Joseph Merrick into the future to begin a career in television. There he joined the 1990s chat-show circuit, where he appeared on I Love 1871, and early 21st century reality television, where he consulted on Whore Idol. (PROSE: The Beasthouse)
Appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
He resembled his father, which he attributed to maternal impression.
He described himself as "repellently scarred", although less so than Joseph Merrick. Many of these deformities were caused by his early experiments with time travel, when there was high risk of "blowing a hole in one's own genetic structure and condemning oneself to a life of biological vampirism in an attempt to alleviate the agony."
After he was expelled from l'Academie Sinistaire, his deformities were reclassified from "monstrous" to merely "ugly". To hide his face or lack thereof, he wore a distinctive devil-rabbit mask. (PROSE: The Beasthouse)
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
The notion of an offspring of Fu Manchu has a significant literary backing. The Sax Rohmer books themselves featured a daughter of Fu Manchu called Fah Lo Suee (also referred to as Ling Moy in the film Daughter of the Dragon and as Lin Tang in the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies), who was a criminal in her own right but still suffered abuse at the hands of her father, including serving as a test subject for a near-complete brainwashing technique that leaves her with an entirely new personality.
Later and perhaps more famously, after Marvel Comics temporarily acquired the comic-book rights to Fu Manchu, they introduced his rebellious, heroic son, "Shang Chi, Master of Kung-Fu". Interestingly, much like Miles in The Beasthouse, Marvel Comics media in years following Shang-Chi's debut became unable to mention Fu Manchu by name; though the character of Fu Manchu eventually fell into the public domain, the name remains a trademark held by Rohmer's estate.
Miles's nameless son of Fu Manchu thus trades on the dual legacy of these two characters, though he is distinct from either. Additionally, the idea of a character who became disfigured by experimental time travel between the Victorian era and the future, in a context associated with Fu-Manchu-esque imagery, is reminiscent of Magnus Greel in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, although there is no real suggestion in The Beasthouse that Magnus actually is Fu Manchu's son.
