Issue(s): Yellow Claw #3
Cover Date: Dec 56
Title: "The Yellow Claw captured"
Credits:
Jack Kirby - Writer
Jack Kirby - Penciler
Paul Reinman - Inker

Review/plot:
It's kind of cool that in the mid 1950s we had a comic book whose main character was a villain. The Yellow Claw is a yellow skinned Fu Manchu type character. He seems terribly racist, and yet the good guy in this story is also Chinese: Jimmy Woo of the FBI, and he is colored with a realistic skin tone and depicted as a highly competent agent.

The government forces Jimmy Woo to take advantage of his relationship with the Yellow Claw's niece Suwan in order to locate the Yellow Claw and capture him.

He invites her out to dinner...

...and afterward trails her back to the Claw's secret base. He manages to capture the Claw and his ex-Nazi henchman Fritz von Voltzmann...

...but an Arabic henchmen quickly attacks Woo and sends him back to the surface in a glass bubble.

The Claw figures on familial guilt being enough punishment for Suwan.

Interestingly considering the fact that the Agents of Atlas series will eventually reveal that the Claw has actually been grooming Jimmy Woo for a leadership role and never wanted to really kill him, the Claw is surprisingly uninterested in actually killing Woo in this issue. He just sends him far away in the bubble.

All of this happens within the span of 4 pages.

I only have a few scattered reprints of individual stories from what was only a 4 issue series, and here is another one from the same issue. I was pretty excited to find this story reprinted in the back of my Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3, not just because it's another Yellow Claw story and so it was going to be awesome no matter what, but because it's the one where the Claw has gathered a group of "mutants"...

...and forces them to cause strange things to happen.

FBI agent Jimmy Woo defines mutants as "people with deviations... in either mind or body... or both!". (It's worth noting that this is all Kirby here, and the mutant concept is defined surprisingly similar to what we'll get in the X-Men.).

When he is led to the Yellow Claw's base by the Claw's nice Suwan, he observes that these mutants are normal looking, but the Claw says it's their brains that are developed.

Then Suwan bangs a gong, and the Claw's hold on the mutants are broken, and they immediately teleport away. The Claw grabs Suwan and flees as well.

Even thought the Claw escapes, Woo is happy that "the mutant menace is ended for good".

This group of mutants is tied in with another pre X-Men mutant in John Byrne's X-Men:The Hidden Years and called "The Promise".

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 3 - formative Yellow Claw story. Introduces mutants later shown in "The Promise".

Chronological Placement Considerations: Placing this before the story from Yellow Claw #3 that was reprinted in "The Golden Age of Marvel Comics".

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Marvel Premiere #2, Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3

The Nazi was called Fritz Voltzmann (aka Karl Von Horstbaden), a regular supporting character who did appear in a few later Marvel Age Yellow Claw stories.

Yellow Claw reprints appear in all the Giant-Size MOKFs.