Yellow Claw Primer
Series Overview
When you can’t get the rights to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu character what can you do? Well if you’re in the comic book industry, it’s just a simple matter of copying the source material, making very, very thin differences to make a similar — but legally different — character. National Comics (the precursor to DC Comics) did that very thing back in Detective Comics #1 when they introduced Ching Lung, a blatant Fu Manchu clone.
This series took the concept behind Fu Manchu and adapted it for an American audience. Instead of British detective, this series had Yellow Claw going head to head with the FBI’s top man, a Chinese operative named Jimmy Woo. Still the series fizzled after four issues. However, that was not the end of the cast of characters in Yellow Claw. About a decade later Yellow Claw and Jimmy Woo made their returns in Strange Tales as part of SHIELD’s cast of characters.
John Byrne used the Yellow Claw series to draw obscure characters for both Marvel: The Lost Generation and X-Men: The Hidden Years.
In the ensuing decades, Yellow Claw popped up every now and again as an occasional opponent of its superhero characters. Jimmy Woo made regular appearances in SHIELD related stories and even became a main character in Marvel’s run of Godzilla. In more recent times, both Woo and Yellow Claw were brought back in Agents of Atlas. That series tried to back away from some of the more racist elements of Yellow Claw. As it turned out Yellow Claw wasn’t really a bad guy, but an altruistic character that was only pretending to be a bad guy so he could make Jimmy Woo — his chosen successor for the Atlas Foundation a secret organization dating back to the Mongol Empire that is actually a force for good. So… yeah…
