Yellow Claw #2

History

The Yellow Claw series was launched at Atlas Comics — the direct predecessor to Marvel — by writer Al Feldstein (fresh from EC Comics, where he had edited titles shut down by the Comics Code Authority) and artist Joe Maneely, under editor-in-chief Martin Goodman. Feldstein and Maneely established the premise in issue #1, but Kirby stepped in as sole writer-artist beginning with issue #2, released in August 1956 with a December 1956 cover date. Kirby's motivations appear to have been partly financial — his Simon & Kirby partnership and his Prize Comics romance work were winding down — and he embraced the title as a laboratory for science-fiction plotting. Unusually for a Kirby-drawn book, he did not draw the cover; John Severin provided the cover for this issue (and for #4), while Kirby concentrated entirely on the interior stories, inking his own pencils with assistance from his wife Roz Kirby.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Issue #2 (cover date: December 1956; on-sale date: August 14, 1956) signals the complete creative handover to Jack Kirby, who wrote, penciled, and inked all four of the issue's main Yellow Claw stories — one of the very rare instances in his career where he inked his own pencils.
• The lead story, 'Concentrate on Chaos!' (5 pages), introduces six reality-warping mutants — named Gene Bitner, Simon Lestron, Craig Farnsworth, and Ernest Scope among them — who are enslaved by the Yellow Claw via hypnosis to cause chaos across California; these characters predate the X-Men by roughly five years and were later retroactively folded into Marvel mutant continuity through X-Men: The Hidden Years.
• The cover was drawn by John Severin (not Kirby), an unusual arrangement noted by comics historians: Kirby drew all the interior content but did not produce covers for any of the three Yellow Claw issues he worked on.
• The issue also contains 'Temujai the Golden Goliath,' introducing the robot Temujai — a giant android built by the Yellow Claw to impersonate a legendary Asian deity and incite war — as well as the villain Kharion Krowe, both making their first and only appearances.
• Fritz Von Voltzmann (alias Karl von Horstbadden) appears as the Yellow Claw's Nazi war criminal lieutenant — a character notable in the 1956 context for being explicitly blackmailed into service by the threat of exposure of his crimes, including a reference to Auschwitz, an unusually mature narrative element for an American comic of the era.
• 'The Mystery of Cabin 361,' another Kirby story in the issue, follows Jimmy Woo going undercover aboard a ship to track the Yellow Claw, with Suwan depicted as both captive and recurring wild card in the hero-villain dynamic.
• Stories from this issue were reprinted across multiple 1970s Marvel publications: 'Concentrate on Chaos' in Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3 (March 1975); 'The Mystery of Cabin 361' and 'Temujai the Golden Goliath' in Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #4 (June 1975); and an unnamed Yellow Claw story in Marvel Premiere #2 (May 1972). The entire issue was also collected in Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Black Knight/Yellow Claw (September 2009).
• Jimmy Woo — introduced in issue #1 and continuing here as the protagonist — is regarded as one of the earliest Chinese-American heroes in mainstream American comics; Kirby's visual redesign beginning with this issue moved the character away from the yellowface caricature of the first issue toward a more naturalistic depiction.

Cast · 10 characters

Full credits

Key issues in Yellow Claw

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#1 1st appearance — Jimmy Woo