Jimmy Woo has continued to refine his field and investigative skills, and received S.H.I.E.L.D. training. He’s a very capable agent, among the best even within S.H.I.E.L.D. However almost all of his appearances during this era as are a bit player, as reflected in his DC Heroes Hero Points.

History

Using experimental S.H.I.E.L.D. ESP equipment, Woo helped Colonel Fury locate the Claw. Even S.H.I.E.L.D. was taxed by the immense resources and the genius of the Claw, however - though the battle revealed several new agents such as Clay Quartermain, the Countess Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine and Sidney “the Gaffer” Levine. Fury survived the assaults of the Claws’ organisation by the skin of his teeth, but Woo was captured during the second step of a two-stage ambush.

For a time, it seemed that Su Wan was killed during the final clash between Fury and the Yellow Claw, and died in Jimmy’s arms. James Woo swore vengeance against both men. However, S.H.I.E.L.D. determined that the “Claw” and “Su Wan” had been incredibly realistic robot doubles all along. Fury wrote Woo to inform him of this, and to make a job offer as he wanted the G-Man on his team. Jimmy eventually agreed to join S.H.I.E.L.D.

Don’t yield ! Back S.H.I.E.L.D. !

Woo qualified up to the top level, beating the traps and opponents in the death maze reserved to testing agents capable of personally working with Fury in the field. He finished his full S.H.I.E.L.D. training, though Fury was captured by the renegade scientific genius Centurius before he could give Woo his first assignment.

Agent Woo regularly worked with the top S.H.I.E.L.D. people, though much of his late 1960s career with that organisation is undocumented. His known cases include :

• Rescuing Fury from a foreign plot to ruin confidence in S.H.I.E.L.D. by drugging agents so that they would become psychotic berserkers.
• Helping debrief Supremus’s half-sister after Fury foiled the twisted genius’s mad plot.
• Being part of the crack team that confronted the Hate-Monger and discovered that he was actually Adolf Hitler.
• Being sent along with Gabe Jones to hunt down Fury after he was framed as a traitor.
• Helping Dum-Dum Dugan run S.H.I.E.L.D. while Nick Fury had faked his death to track down Scorpio, the leader of the Zodiac terrorist organisation.

Woo was also involved with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s clashes with the “king of monsters”, Gojira (aka Godzilla) during the late 1970s. He found himself attracted toward Tamara Hashioka, the assistant of Dr. Takiguchi, a scientist famous for his oft-successful efforts to repel or calm Gojira. However, Ms. Hashioka did not initially return his interest, in part because of Woo’s rash actions to gain her interest.

During the Gojira “campaign”, Woo had to stop the gigantic Red Ronin robot. This machine had been built by Mr. Takiguchi and Ms. Hashioka using Stark facilities but Takiguchi’s grandson, a kid named Rob, commandeered it. As he stopped Red Ronin, Jimmy Woo discovered that Rob had fallen unconscious, but not before imprinting his psyche upon the robot and making it impossible for anybody else to pilot it. The kid soon hijacked the robot again in an effort to prevent S.H.I.E.L.D. from killing Gojira, whom Rob considered to be his friend.

Despite the previous misunderstandings, a romance burgeoned between Agent Woo and Ms. Hashioka. This distracted them enough to allow Rob to commandeer the Red Ronin yet again, but the agent and the researcher managed to extricate Rob from the wrecked mecha after a brutal fight pitting the Ronin against giant alien monsters. After they debriefed Rob, S.H.I.E.L.D. forces started distracting the aliens, allowing the King of Monsters to kill them one by one and save Earth.

Mr. Woo and Ms. Hashioka started a relationship, but it did not survive the Gojira “campaign”. The King of Monsters was finally knocked out, captured and sent to prehistoric times to live with other giant lizards. For Tamara, this meant leaving the US and returning to Japan as the crises were over, and she and Jimmy had to break up.

After Godzilla - the 1980s

James Woo was later transferred to the Hong Kong Division of S.H.I.E.L.D., presumably as the regional director. In 1984, he and his personal team were informed by Director Fury that the Black Widow was operating on their turf. They assisted her in her clash against mercenaries sent to kill her by Damon Dran, the Invincible Man, and saved her life after she was defeated by the Iron Maiden.

During the second half of the 1980s, S.H.I.E.L.D. was stealthily taken over during a complex plot called the Deltite Conspiracy. Along with several other key agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., James Woo was replaced by a LMD duplicate. The substitution was not noticed, as the Deltites first replaced the sharpest agents below Fury to reduce chances of detection.

However, even an android double of Woo remained a hero. After exposure to a fatal level of radiation the Woo LMD, along with the LMD doubles of Clay Quartermain, Jasper Sitwell and Jack Rollins, destroyed the stolen power core powering Delta installations and thus the Deltite conspiracy. However the original James Woo was presumed dead at the hands of the Delta conspiracy, as were the numerous agents who had been replaced by Deltite LMDs.

The iron age

In 1993, S.H.I.E.L.D. found suspended animation pods containing the missing agents, who had been stockpiled and brainwashed to become Hydra agents. Many were reactivated by Baron Strucker and sent to kill Fury ; one such group included Woo, Sidney Levine, Jasper Sitwell, Laura Brown and two unidentified agents. Colonel Fury and Captain America stopped them and had them deprogrammed. Woo and the others returned to active duty in time for an assault on Baron Strucker’s newest fortress, during which Nick Fury killed the Nazi.

It would seem that, along with other core S.H.I.E.L.D. agents such as Jasper Sitwell, Woo experienced difficulties returning to life and service after having been brainwashed and believed dead for five years. His personality became more sinister and violent, and along with Sitwell he started specialising in interrogation work, becoming one of the top interrogators within S.H.I.E.L.D.. Though he was only seen performing verbal/behavioural interrogation, there were vague hints of more physical methods.

It was their work who allowed Nick Fury to detect a conspiracy headed by the Latverian Prime Minister Lucia von Bardas, over which Fury eventually decided to launch an illegal ’secret war‘ in 2005.

However, far greater revelations were in store for James Woo.

Description

Mr. Woo likes wearing good, tailored dark business suits - and would rather wear one than one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. beta jumpsuits.

Even in the 1980s Jimmy seemed to be, at most, in his late 30s. Since he was chronologically in his mid-40s I’d assume he aged normally, if gracefully and while staying in top physical shape. Later appearances depicted him as beign roughly his chronological age.

Personality

In 1968 (during the landmark Lee/Steranko S.H.I.E.L.D. stories), Woo’s speech and thought-bubbles acquire a faux-Oriental character, but this thankfully lasted for but a few pages.

In the 1980s, Jimmy acquires a bit of characterisation - he’s a man of action and a crisply professional agent, as well as a formal, precise, respectful man. His English (and, I assume, his Cantonese) is free of contractions and colloquialisms, and even when holding people at gunpoint his threats are exact and polite.

Getting disappeared, brainwashed and put into suspended animation for years apparently had a significant impact on him ; it would seem that it triggered a personal crisis (perhaps loved ones moved on with their lives as they thought him dead) and that he harboured an unhealthy amount of anger over those events. He became more sarcastic and considerably more violent, and seemed to enjoy his role as an interrogator, even when it included phases of manhandling bound suspects. During that period he apparently became a closer friend of fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. senior agent Jasper Sitwell, who became his usual partner when interrogating super-villains and terrorists. The strange humour of their dialogue as they verbally interrogated subjects, sometimes likened to a good SNL skit, was popular with other agents watching the tapes as improv comedy.