Claw the Unconquered #1!

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

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Who doesn't love a good barbarian?

Seemingly everyone, judging by the failure of any sword and sorcery comic, other than Conan's, to take flight in the 1970s.

Not that it stopped publishers from trying. As well as the Cimmerian sword-swinger, Marvel gave us its attempts at Kull and Red Sonja books in that decade but neither of those ever really stuck.

And, of course, Atlas unleashed the power and majesty of Ironjaw and Wulf upon an ungrateful world but neither of their books managed to even make it to a 5th issue.

Not to be left out of all this failure, DC gave us its take on the genre with Beowulf and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Neither of which seem to have set the spinner racks on fire either.

But we shouldn't forget that, in its most daring move yet, DC also gave us Claw the Unconquered who looked so much like Conan that it's a miracle they ever thought they'd get away with it.

But, of course, he wasn't Conan.

Claw had a red gauntlet. And, in the world of barbarians, that's a huge difference, I can tell you.

Gauntlets aside, how does his debut issue stack up alongside the fare we were already well used to from Marvel's flagship stabber of sorcerers?

Naive in the ways of civilisation, Claw strolls into some town or other and is promptly assailed by a mugger who's promptly flattened.

In the local tavern, Claw's then latched onto by a money-hungry serving wench who quickly discovers his secret - that his bright red gauntlet conceals the fact that he has the hand of a demon!

But, no sooner has our hero vacated the tavern than he's assailed again. This time, by a bunch of men out to bump him off because of his diabolical fingers.

Needless to say, such fools are no match for Claw and are rapidly vanquished.

But, now, it seems like the whole town's out to get him.

Elsewhere, the, surviving, leader of his attackers informs the local king - Occulas - of Claw's presence and, at once, the ruler knows the barbarian must be killed.

That's because we get a flashback to how Occulas became monarch, which involved him having a local peasant killed for having a demon's hand, in response to a prediction by his own wizard that only a man with a demon's hand could pose a threat to his ambitions.

But little did the villain know that - even as the peasant was being slain - nearby, was a baby who also had a demon's claw. A baby that was promptly taken into the care of a mystery interloper.

Back in the present and back in the town, Claw and the serving wench who, I think, has still not been named, take refuge in an abandoned temple.

Only to have King Occulas' lackey Zedon show up and summon the abandoned temple's abandoned god 

It is here that we learn Claw doesn't remember his past and has no knowledge of his destiny. In this, he seems to strongly resemble Atlas' Ironjaw, if in no other way.

Regardless, no mere god can stand before the might of Claw and, with the Lovecraftian deity and Zedon both out of the way, the serving wench makes what must be her fourth attempt this issue to betray our hero before he dumps her on her backside and leaves, now aware that there's a price upon his head.

You can't get around it, drawn by regular Conan inker Ernie Chua, the thing looks just like an issue of Conan.

Where it differs is in its writing. Thanks to his lack of memory, Claw's a blank slate - unknown to even himself - and, thus, displays no noticeable sign of a personality. He has no aims, no goals and no ambitions, simply strolling around with barely a thought in his head, getting into scraps purely because other people keep attacking him.

He doesn't even seem to display any curiosity as to why they keep attacking him.

Nor does he show any interest in the serving wench who accompanies him throughout the tale. He neither lusts after her, nor cares for her. Nor does he even seem to permanently resent her constant betrayals of him.

In fairness to Ironjaw who - with his mystery upbringing and unknowing link to the local king, has a very similar setup - might have been a deranged, sex-crazed incest-happy psychopath but he did at least have a personality and actual goals. His goals were all repellent but they were, at least, goals.

The comic's failure to even name Claw's female accomplice gives us two main characters who are, basically, just drawings on a sheet of paper and suggests an overall lack of interest in both by writer David Michelinie.

I've not read any issues of this book other than this one but, if it continued along the route of having a totally inert and purely reactive hero, you can see why it would have struggled.

The obvious question is whether it did carry on in this vein or whether it started to develop his character from now on?

In his defence; his run lasting for 12 issues, Claw hung around for longer than Wulf and Ironjaw but, as things stand in his first issue, he was threatening to give the Conan creative team little to worry about.