Claw the Unconquered

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Claw
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Claw the Unconquered #1 (May–June 1975)
Created by	David Michelinie (writer) Ernie Chan (artist)
In-story information
Alter ego	Valcan Scaramax
Place of origin	Pytharia

Claw is a fictional character, a sword and sorcery hero published by DC Comics.

He first appeared in Claw the Unconquered #1 (June 1975), and was created by

David Michelinie and Ernie Chan.-YEAH,GET ATLEAST OF THE GUYS,THAT WORK ON THE CONAN COMIC BOOKS.

Similar in many ways to Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian (and, more particularly,

Marvel Comics' depiction of him), Claw is a wanderer and a barbarian in an apparently

prehistoric age who battles various wizards, thieves, monsters, and warriors who cross his path.He could pass for

Conans younger brother-if Conan had a younger brother,that is.CLAW also known as Valcan is a

Warrior of Pytharia who battled the Shadow Gods.

Unlike Conan however, Claw has a deformed, claw-like right hand, the result of a curse which has

been placed on his family.That ofcourse,directly stolen from Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion-Prince Korum

[hide]

Publication history[edit]

Claw the Unconquered #1 debuted in mid-1975, a period when DC Comics launched a record number of new titles on to the comic book market (16 new titles debuted in 1975 alone).

Claw was one of several of these new series which were set in the "fantasy" or "sword and sorcery" genre, (other titles include Warlord, Stalker, Starfire, Nightmaster, Tor,

and Beowulf, Dragon Slayer). At the time DC's main rival Marvel Comics had found success in the genre with their Conan the Barbarian comics, and of all of DC's new fantasy

characters Claw most closely resembles Conan in both his character and appearance (save the fact that Claw has a deformed hand). Claw the Unconquered was published

bimonthly up until #9 (October, 1976), restarting again at #10 (May 1978). The entire series was written by Michelinie (though the never properly published #14

was credited to Tom DeFalco) and Chan remained on the title up to #7, with Keith Giffen taking over pencilling duties with #8. With the addition of Giffen,

the series began to incorporate some sci-fi elements, moving away from its pure sword and sorcery beginnings. The relaunch of the series lasted just three issues,

as it was suddenly cancelled with #12 (September 1978) as part of the "DC Implosion" when DC's comics line was drastically cut. The cancellation was so sudden

that two further issues of the series had been fully written and drawn. These stories were published in Cancelled Comic Cavalcade #1 in 1978, (however only 35

copies of that comic were ever officially published). The character was revived in 1981 for a two part back up feature in Warlord #48-49 (August–September 1981)

written by Jack C. Harris with art from Tom Yeates. This series tried to wrap up the story of Claw.

Fictional character biography

Cover to Claw #1, June 1975

Claw's (real name Valcan) adventures took place "in the realm of Pytharia" in a vaguely defined setting which resembled Earth's prehistory. His first adventure pitted him against "Occulas of the Yellow Eye" an Evil sorcerer and king who it is revealed, murdered Claw's father (who also had a deformed hand like his son). Occulas received a prophecy which predicted that a claw handed man would defeat him, and this is his reason for persecuting Valcan and his father.He also fought some guy,that looked like Stumbo the Giant and a bunch of tired Fantasy troupes.

Claw's origin was revealed in #9, where Valcan learns that his family is cursed to have demon hands throughout their bloodline as a result of a deal his father made with demons.

In later stories it was revealed that Claw existed on the same world (Pytharia) as the original Starfire, which is apparently not Earth. Both Starfire and Claw were revealed as two of the "eternal champions of the Sornaii"-a leftover from the cancelled Dominic Fortune comic. The implications of this revelation were never explored as the series ended in a cliffhanger.

Claw the Unconquered - DC Comics - Sword and sorcery barbarian

Category :

Comic Books

Subcategory :

Other DC stuff

Type :

Hero

Game System :

Dual-stats (MnM / DCH)

Notes :

The world trembles before his deadly blade !

Claw the Unconquered v1.1

By Dr. Peter S Piispanen and Sébastien Alexandre Andrivet

Source of Character: Claw the Unconquered (DC comics) and later appearances and crossovers.

Helper(s): Darci

Reasons (1): Claw was one of the swords-and-sorcery heroes DC launched in the mid-1970s, and the most successful of the lot along with the Warlord. Part of his (relative) popularity is that he’s essentially the DC version of Conan with a strong hook - the demon hand - grafted on.

Reasons (2): The Known World in which Claw originally operated was sketched out by writer David Michelinie in a way that is eerily reminiscent of the work of Dungeon Masters in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s. For context, Claw was published in 1975 and the very first edition of D&D was released in 1974.

Reasons (3): There are S P O I L E R S therein for everything from the 1975 series to the 2006 series and beyond - things are already complicated enough without having to dance around some information.

Reasons (4): The interpretation of Claw varies from series to series, and he’s often written as a generic barbarian type with a distinctive curse. For purposes of characterisation and stats, this entry considers that Michelinie’s 1970s take on the character is the most authoritative one, and downplays or rationalises changes stemming from a different take on the character. The 1970s version was obviously inspired by Howard’s Conan, whereas the subsequent versions are shaped by the movie version of Conan starring Schwarzenegger and thus feel more… generic to readers familiar with the 1982 movie since it greatly influenced the popular view of heroic-fantasy barbarian warriors.

Behold the realm of the fifteen worlds — seven of light and seven of darkness, and one world hanging precariously in the balance. The place where the real and the world of dream fuse and become the one — the world of Claw the Unconquered !

Reward - 10 000 dreknars for the head and right hand of Claw ! The world trembles before his deadly blade !

Writeups.org & Amazon.com recommend Claw the Unconquered - modern TPBs and vintage comics.

Quotes

Claw the Unconquered

Axeman: “Aye, but Jarmal’s carcass pulls his sword from him ! And he’ll not escape me so—”
Claw: “You talk too much, axeman ! Allow me to cure you of that vulgar habit !” [KRAK]

Mahan K‘Handa: “Forgive me, Pytharian. I neglected to mention the spell of protection I’ve cast about Moonthorn. It is impenetrable — and shall endure until the event of my — unlikely demise !”
Claw: “In that case, wizard. Allow me to hasten along that ’unlikely‘ circumstance !” [Throws sword]

“Perhaps it is demon blood this sea of gore cries out for !”

“Ho, monster, you’re fast — but ’twould seem that Valcan is faster !”

“Gods ! Is there no end to the monsters prowling this world ?”

“Soth ! I should have known there’d be guardians more formidable than that silken-haired wench !”

(As a deformed giant kills his mount under him) “By the seven hells, that was a good horse ! The beast makes this a personal fight !”

(After killing off looters and would-be rapists) “’twas not nobility, girl, but necessity. We require information, and you seemed the likeliest source.”

“My preferences change not. I still have no love for this world. But, unfortunately, it’s the only world I’ve got.”

“Hmph. Care for a world that stalks me for the price on my head ? No, I seek the silver sword because it might offer a clue to my shadowed past — and if I happen to save a world in the bargain, ’tis no fault of my own.”

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Fifteen Worlds

Claw’s milieu is a system of fifteen proximate planes, with a Dimensional Travel Distance of but one between each other. There are various ways to interpret what we’re told about the fifteen worlds. Here are the known facts and hypothetical frameworks to tie all of this together :

The most likely organisation is that there are eight dimensions who are floating into a common interdimensional “void”. This void is divided between seven Shadow-Gods, and is thus considered to constitute seven of the fifteen worlds, and to be aligned with chaos. This interdimensional void has teratogenic properties - even brief exposure will mutate living beings into developing demonic-looking traits. It’s not “void” in the sense of being a vacuum - actually it’s full of stuff - but in the sense that nothing is structured or long-lasting, and in the sense of a moral void.
The more straightforward organisation is that the Fifteen Worlds are fifteen distinct entities and not eight plus one divided into seven. This is not the impression I got when trying to understand how the void hells were depicted in the story, but it has the advantage of being simple and one illustration seems to support that view, showing what may be fifteen planets.
Making mistakes while handling magical forces within the Fifteen Worlds has a definite tendency to rip the dimensional fabric and expose the experimenter to one of the void worlds. Many of the mutated, chaotic-looking monsters in Claw’s world seem to be unique results of such accidental exposure, rather than D&D-style races of monsters.
Seven of the eight non-void dimensions are said to be worlds of law, dominated by the Gods of Elder Light. From what is glimpsed of those, it seems that the world “law” should be taken more literally than one would expect, and in the same sense as the phrase “rule of law”. That is, these places have a formalised society where everybody is expected to behave according to a set of clear and documented rules. Apparently this has magical implications allowing these worlds not to become like the interdimensional void. One of the seven worlds is named Awadaka and is Ghilkyn’s home world.

Claw the Unconquered - DC Comics - Sword and sorcery barbarian

The Shadow-God and the Lords of Elder Light cannot fight directly, since that would destroy their multiverse.
The fifteenth world is the one that includes the kingdom of Pytharia, the heroic-fantasy land from which Claw the Unconquered originates. It is repeatedly described as being in balance between the two. This manifests as it having a primitive society, but those rules and laws that exist are crude and fragile, and most people seem interested in twisting them or dodging them for immediate, personal benefit. Society might thus crumble under the weight of naked greed and impulses, or might eventually grow and consolidate. As such it is the lynchpin of the fifteen world, and having it swing more clearly toward law or toward chaos would provide that side with a tipping point advantage in making all fifteen worlds theirs.
“Pytharia” is but a kingdom on this world (see the map), but it has sometimes been used to designate the whole world. A proper name for the world might be “Terra Arcana” - read on for more - though the name given by Michelinie was the Known World. A scene showing a brief view of the Fifteen Worlds shows Claw standing on a planet whose geography is very reminiscent of a simplified depiction of Earth, which may have been meant to imply that it is a parallel Earth - or the past or future of Earth.
Two other David Michelinie works from the 1970s (Starfire and Star Hunters) exist within this multiverse, as two of the worlds of law (or perhaps the future or past of one or two such worlds). In Star Hunters, both Claw and Starfire are referenced as “Champions of the Sornaii”, which seems to designate a collective of pro-law divine entities given Claw’s background. The Sornaii may be the same thing as the Gods of Elder Light.
Donovan Flint also becomes a Champion of the Sornaii - see his writeups.org entry - though Star Hunters died at that point.
A third flashback in the Star Hunters scene picturing the Champions of the Sornaii depicts what seem to be a WWII-era combat scene, but is not identifiable. My No-Prize Hypothesis - since all works referenced are Michelinie’s own - is that the unidentifiable Champion of the Sornaii was the Unknown Soldier, the one World War II hero Michelinie got to write during his early career. It would also make a bit of perverse sense that the Unknown Soldier would be the unidentifiable, faceless one on the page whereas Claw and Starfire are clearly visible.
Since Michelinie’s work of that time is explicitly influenced by 1960s Moorcock works (particularly the law vs. chaos aspect), one may imagine that the Champion of the Sornaii is a figure like Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. But this is purely speculative.
Stalker’s world and Beowulf’s world might be among the fifteen worlds. The multi-dimensional Oracle knew of Beowulf and Claw as well as of Stalker, and travel between the DCU and these three heroic-fantasy worlds was quick and easy using a shard from the Rock of Eternity. In this context, it should be noted that :
- Stalker’s world had a backstory identical to that of Starfire - advanced human space colonists are overwhelmed by magical aliens and thrown back into low-tech slavery until they can rebel and exile their magical alien masters. Starfire’s era could easily be the distant past of Stalker’s world, and hers the rebellion of legend in Stalker’s world history. Claw is later seen operating in a milieu with the same backstory - see the History section.
- While in Starfire’s era law was ascendant, in Stalker’s time the world seemed to be well on its way to become a void world, with the hell-lord Dgrth being quite powerful and the world itself being slowly drained of beauty. Stalker’s world may have been the world in balance at that point, or it might have been a “mild” void world - lawless and breaking down, but not a sanity-blasting reality smudge.
- Dgrth didn’t just threaten Stalker’s world, but numerous dimensions including the DCU. If Stalker’s world was the one in balance (and losing to chaos), then Dgrth’s plan was presumably to finish winning the war there, then take on seven dimensions of law with ease and massacre billions using the advantage given to him by tipping the balance.
- Beowulf’s world was also concerned with issues of an emerging society vs. chaos and evil. Interestingly, it was but one AP of dimensional distance away from an underworld ruled by Satan and full of monsters and chaos, with Satan toying with the world and using monsters such as the Blood-Beast Grendel to weaken the rule of law. That Beowulf’s world might have been the world in balance is a credible hypothesis.

Other worlds such as the one of Crystar the Crystal Warrior could be part of the fifteen worlds as the world-in-the-balance of their time, as they also use a strong framework of law vs. chaos as their central conflict.
Hyborea (home to Conan, Red Sonja and others) exists among the Fifteen Worlds — when Sonja and Claw met, it seemed to them that they lived on the same world. The caption specifies that there exists a “lawless wasteland” between the Hyborian kingdoms and Pytharia, which does sound like one of the Voids. Though it looked like a mostly-normal, bandit-infested wasteland, this land was rife with corruption, breeding mutated monsters was simple, there was little law and the life expectancies were as bad as you’d expect, and so on. It didn’t match the standard image of the demon-infested warped insanity, but presumably not all the seven voids are identical and it may have been a “mild” chaos plane.
Hyborea is part of the Marvel Universe - it is in the past of Earth-616 and natives from that era such as Conan, Sonja, Kulan Gath, etc. have interacted with persons from the far future such as the X-Men or Spider-Man. This would lead to the conclusion that the Marvel Universe is or was one of the seven worlds of law - perhaps existing at the very edge of the fifteen worlds system and thus not as implicated in the law vs. chaos war and not as concerned with corruption by the void. There’s little to refute this hypothesis - the Marvel Universe has its share of action tied to a war between chaos and law, such as the 2011 Chaos War or the various clashes between Lord Chaos and Master Order. The Chaos War might be the result of a defeat of the forces of law on the world in balance, strengthening chaos among the fifteen worlds.
However - the Red Sonja in this tale could have been from an alternate version of Hyborea, existing on a Earth parallel to Earth-616. Even meta-fictionally, it’s hard to tell - this Hyborea was depicted by another publisher, which is usually a clue of a parallel world, but on the other hand the goal was to channel the classic stories published by Marvel back in the days where mighty-thewed (and occasionally also mighty-bosomed) barbarians were an important part of their repertoire. For instance, Sonja was wearing the, hmm, scalemail bikini that is a signature visual of that Marvel era.

The DCU is likewise touched by Claw, or more precisely his descendants. Putting aside one joke appearance at The Oblivion (the otherdimensional bar frequented by magical types from all eras and dimension of the DC Universe), and the encounter with Wonder Woman chronicled in this entry, the occurrences are :
- Claw the Unconquered of the XXth century Primal Force on New Earth, the main Earth of the DCU. In 1994, the demon hand is borne by a man from Hong Kong called John Chan. Dr. Mist says that he hadn’t seen the demon hand in 800 years, so Claw’s lineage has presumably been on New Earth since at least the Middle Ages.
- Claw the Unconquered from Terra Arcana (appearing in the 2000s in the Creature Commandos Limited Series). This story - which occurs “in the future” - is impossible to place in a continuity and is often considered an Elseworld. The Claw who appears there introduces himself as Claw of Pytharia, Son of Kregar (though Pytharia later morphes to Pythana). It could be the original after some dimensional travelling to another of the Fifteen Worlds, it could be a parallel version. The hypothesis we’ll use here is that, since the story occurs somewhen in the future, this man is a descendant of Valcan and the family has a tradition of naming male children after their grandfather. It’s an unsupported judgement call, though.
  This man claimed to have battled the Shadow-Gods and won, and seemed to exist in symbiosis with his demon-claw, freely using its magic even while wearing a grey gauntlet looking like the original Claw’s and also made or oraculum. The demon paw’s magic was much more overt and powerful, of the “casting large eldritch bolts” variety. He had to beware the influence of the hand or act in a brutal, bloodthirsty fashion, and occasionally succumbed to the influence, taking off his gauntlet and acting like a demon until he was forced to wear the gauntlet again. Sorcerers around him knew that the gauntlet was a gift from the Gods of Elder Light, attributed its weakening influence to the rise of evil on Terra Arcana, and the story was taking place in the greater context of interdimensional consolidation and invasion by lawless forces, so there’s a good chance that what we witnessed in this series was the distant future of the Fifteen Worlds and that “Terra Arcana” was the world in balance.
- It is possible that the Claw who appears in Time Master : Vanishing Point was a descendant rather than the original, but there’s no way to tell.
Like the MU, the DCU is likely one of the seven worlds of law in the Fifteen Worlds cosmology. Since the clash of law and chaos play a greater role in the DCU than in the MU (the Lords of Chaos and Order, Doctor Fate, Hawk and Dove, etc.), the DCU might be a wee bit more included in the main system. Maybe Nekron is originally one of the seven Shadow-Gods, or maybe the rise of the Black Lanterns was the result of a defeat of law on the Known World - whereas, say, the capture of the Starheart was made possible by early victories of the forces of Elder Light on the Known World.
A recent (2010) story (Time Master : Vanishing Point) has both Claw and Starfire encountered in the timestream, which would seem to indicate that Claw’s time is the distant past of New Earth and Starfire’s time lies somewhen in the future. However, it is important to note that both encounters took place due to a sabotaged time jump, and Rip Hunter’s databases couldn’t identify either time period. It is thus entirely possible that these forays were lateral (in another dimension) as well as vertical (in the past and future of New Earth), though that’s not the most likely hypothesis.
These events imply that the “world in balance” always has been the DC Universe’s New Earth, with the realities and the state of the chaos vs. law conflict changing during the aeons to become different from those of Claw’s time. It is certainly possible to postulate that all the worlds discussed in this section are actually New Earth at various point in its history - even the flat world of Stalker, since we know that way back during the reign of the Pre-Dead the Earth had a different physical shape as a result of magic. Starfire’s world could be in the very distant future or past after one of the Great Disasters that punctuate Earth’s history, Beowulf may have existed during roughly the historical time of the poem at a point where the Shadow-God Satan was making a push to anchor his void to Earth, etc. Time Master : Vanishing Pointhas no indication of having considered these implications, but this is certainly a viable arrangement.

Taste of India
One amusing hypothesis that came up during the discussion is that the Known World is actually the India on either Earth-616 (during the Hyborean age) or on New Earth. This fanciful hypothesis uses some tropes that were well-known during the birth of the sword and sorcery genre, in the late 1920s, but have since been thoroughly discredited in the real world - particularly the notion of pale-skinned Aryans from India who migrated to found European cultures. This theory was among those who ended up in Blavatsky occultism, which had some influence on early science fiction and includes stuff such as Hyberborea, Lemuria, the “master race of Atlantis” and so on and so forth.

In a Hyborean context, this would requires ignoring the depiction of Vendhya seen in Conan the Victorious (which is Jordan material, not Howard’s), and use the approach where the Golden Kingdoms are Vendhya (north-northwestern India; the word likely later became Vedic), Kosala (southern Hyborean India) and Uttara Kuru (Hyborean Tibet and Bangladesh). This aligns well with Sonja’s Hyrkania being a fantasy version of the Mongol Empire, and in this approach what Pytharians call the Central Steppes is bordered on the other side by Turan, Hyrkania, Irakzai, Iranistan, (Af)Ghulistan and Shem.

On New Earth… well, the sundry Indian cultures have barely played a role in the DCU, with the exception of the theological material that inspired the Kobra cult. Still, Nanda Parbat would exist beyond the Central Steppes (perhaps it is related to the temple of blind and mind monks seen in the second Claw series), and Rama Kushna as a Goddess of Elder Light is certainly credible.

Background

Real name: Valcan of Pytharia Other aliases: Vulcan the Claw (misinformed reference), Valcan Scaramax Marital Status: Single Known Relatives: Kregar of Kanon Wood (father, deceased), mother (name unrevealed, deceased), an ancestor whose name wasn’t mentioned (deceased), Claw of Pytharia (possibly a descendant, see above), John Chan (aka Claw, descendant). Valcan once described himself as a member of the “Valcan clan”, but that was presumably sarcasm to indicate that he had no living relative. Group affiliation: None Base Of Operations: Mobile Height: 6‘2” Weight: 225lbs Eyes: Steely ice blue ! Hair: Black

Powers and Abilities

Valcan aka Claw is an athletic male of awesome strength and prowess, able with the sword and quick as a cat. Having been trained by the gods, he can easily fight groups of men with little effort, and he has excellent endurance. His killer instinct is exceptional, and he can enter a fighting frenzy whenever needed.

Claw is not just a musclebound barbarian with quick reflexes - when he’s in trouble he swiftly comes up with clever strategies, often relying on a good understanding of basic physics and an ability to quickly consider what do to with everything that’s around him. If the direct approach - his favourite one - doesn’t work, he’ll probably find something. His understanding of physics is close to that of a modern person and he has used such things as focusing heat through a prism to dry an invincible much monster, throw his sword to a monster so it would brandish it on top of a mountain during a raging lightning storm, spread oil on top of water and set it on fire to destroy killer weed, etc. He also had notions of zoology despite his amnesia, such as guessing that a somewhat lobster-like giant monster likely had a soft underbelly.

If Valcan can’t find a way out of a problem or foil an assault then the demon hand will probably take over and use magic - or more devastating ferocity than even Claw can produce. Claw prefers to conserve his HPs and spend them when his demon hand is “accidentally” exposed.

Claw’s gauntlet has protective properties - in particular it could ignore the heat from magical fire of infernal power, or short out a life-draining enchantment on a spear by preventing it from feeding. Claw has also occasionally wielded some magical items for a while, including the Moonthorn sword forged for him by the Gods of Elder Light and a helmet with unspecified properties. Generally, though, Valcan’s equipment - with the notable exception of the gauntlet - has a transient quality and tends to disappear, gets broken, be abandoned, etc. and quickly replaced by similar gear.

In later appearances, Claw’s cunning and agility were less apparent - a No-Prize explanation would be that it was a side effect of exposure to the hand, the greater quantity of demon blood in his body, and the nightmares the hand occasionally subjected to.

Demon’s blood !

When he encounters Red Sonja, the blood of the hand has mingled with Valcan’s blood in greater quantities than ever before, giving him the regenerative powers of a demon.

Presumably this was a gradual process, and it would be reasonable to assume that Valcan already had a very minor level of regeneration during the original stories. Back then nobody would have noticed, as it would still have been within the remit of being a fast healer - not a surprising trait in a hardy barbarian warrior.

When he met Sonja, Claw visibly has a healing factor. It seems about as strong’s as the hand’s own regenerative power, and thus might be the maximum. Our No-Prize Hypothesis is that it follows a power law progression, staying at low levels for years then quickly building up until it hit its ceiling within weeks.

When he had this level of Regeneration, Claw was slower - physically and mentally - than he normally is. One hypothesis is to assume that the demon blood fatigues and confuses him. This physical and mental haze suspended when he was convinced to surrender to the evil within himself.

At the end of the encounter with Sonja, Claw lost his healing factor as the hand needed to focus its regenerative powers back into itself to grow back after having been severed. Afterward Claw had, at most, the recuperative powers that he had in the classic stories.

Note that this section uses the demonstrated regenerative abilities as a No-Prize explanation for why Claw’s characterisation, swiftness and acumen are different in the Claw/Red Sonja miniseries. The material itself never establishes a link between the new regenerative powers and Claw’s personality and abilities. The No-Prize Hypothesis matches with all observed facts, though.

The demonic hand of Valcan

Valcan’s right hand is a demonic entity looking like a webbed, clawed, vaguely draconic hand. It has an intelligence of its own, and its own instincts and agenda. The red gauntlet Claw wears was given to him to shield him from the hand’s influence - but the appendage has been getting stronger, and has been known to take over Claw even when he’s wearing the gauntlet.

In game terms the Hand is simply considered as an asset, since Claws’s player is the one who decides when to resort to the hand’s Powers. In the story having the hand take over is a terrible curse and something evil, but the reader cannot help but to observe that the hand only ever takes over to get Claw out of a problem. The sinister aspect is best left to role-playing — but note that in DCH whenever the player uses the abilities of Claws’s demon hand the paw’s Catastrophic Rage is active, and it might result in consequences that escape the player !

Sometimes, Valcan deliberately gets the gauntlet off to claw at something with the hand. Most often, the gauntlet is accidentally taken off and the hand lashes out at Claw’s enemies. Sometimes, the hand just takes over as Claw seems doomed - putting Claw in a trance and controlling his body, for instance to have him mumble an incantation as the hand casts a spell to save him. Sometimes, the hand reacts on its own before Claw can notice, such as grabbing the dagger of a man about to backstab Claw and twisting the man’s arm to pierce him in the heart with his own weapon. As noted, all of these cases are under the control of Claw’s player, even though in role-playing terms they involve a struggle of influence.

The ungloved hand can claw at foes with a speed, ferocity and strength that outshine even Claw’s. Usually the claw viciously gouges the flesh of opponents, but if Claw surrenders to the hand and fight under its influence, he will usually fight with a sword and the demon hand, a ferocious fighting style of nearly superhuman effectiveness. When the hand is thus free to act, it is quite evil and bloodthirsty. Even if killing people left and right isn’t a big problem, Valcan balks at letting the hand take over and would rather fight with his normal skill level, which is usually amply sufficient. It’s more common for the player to declare that the gauntlet has been accidentally removed than for Valcan to decide to unglove.

The hand does not need to sleep, eat, breathe or drink, and it doesn’t feel pain. That it doesn’t sleep means it can perceive a danger when Valcan is sleeping, and react by taking control of his body as he wakes up - which has saved his life several times given the treacherous nature of Pytharia. It is extremely strong, and can crush and break metallic chains it grasp.

Among the spells the hand cast were sucking black necromantic fire into very small dimensional gates to the void before it would consume Claw and Ghilkyn, or setting a sword on demonic fire that could greatly harm a conjured soul-eating minor god. The hand could also set itself ablaze with demon fire without holding a sword - but in both cases this incendiary ability was used to harm entities closely linked to chaos, and it’s never used otherwise. We’ll thus assume that this spell is specifically meant to hurt entities with certain ties to chaos, and is not useful under other circumstances.

The hand is known to have an affinity for portals between the chaos hells and other dimensions. Beyond sucking evil fire into those hells, it was once able to grasp the astral projection of a sorceress by the throat, which should be impossible, because of that affinity. This requires a particular effort and mindset, and most of the time the hand cannot touch astral beings any more than a normal person can. The hand likely could hurt people through other sorts of magical connection such as clairvoyance or scrying, if there is something to grab - but this is an hypothetical.

Some rituals have a demon’s hand just like Valcan’s as a key component, usually having to do with opening major dimensional breaches.

When the demon hand is hacked off Valcan’s body, it has several options. Those that have been used are:

Run around shadowing Valcan, and reattach itself to the stump as he sleeps or is otherwise unconscious. The hand has done so at least once, perhaps twice.
Channel its regenerative ability and regrow from the stump. The hand first appeared as a tiny version of itself, but quickly regrew to its full size. Any regenerative ability it may have been bestowing to Valcan is greatly weakened by this feat for years.
As it turned out, when the hand decided to regrow, the hand that had been hacked off did not die - there were now two hands, one regrown on Valcan’s arm and one running around in its own. Since the hand did not do that before, it is possible that reproducing in this way required preparations and/or prerequisites. Furthermore the, errr, free hand grew itself a clone body of Claw. This took months, and required the blood and meat from hundreds of large animals and people. Both the ability to “reproduce” and the ability to grow out a clone body are likely Rituals.

In the original stories the hand is obviously sapient and sentient - this is the take reflected in the stats above. In later stories it is still powerful and evil, but never seems to act on its own (though one scene is ambiguous). My No-Prize hypothesis would be that the hand had been preparing a ritual to be able to exist as two hands once Valcan would again chop it off (which he was bound to do sooner or later), but that it was a long-term investment and the magic came at a steep cost in making the hand less willful - and less able to control its own evil. In this hypothesis, the hand expected that the intelligence and maturity of both hands would regrow back to their original level in time.

Claws, Claws everywhere
The two 20055/2006 Claw series have an unclear continuity status relative to the original. The character in the Claw/Red Sonja one feels like a different character, but his background is clearly that of the original. The Claw in the 2006 Wildstorm miniseries might be the original in terms of characterisation (allowing for some character growth), but there is no reference whatsoever to the original series - and it takes place outside of the Known World, as far as I can tell. It also makes a point of using a new name of unknown origin (Valcan Scaramax) and never calling him Valcan of Pytharia. However, a key plot element is that Claw’s demon hand has regrown after it was severed, which references the Claw/Red Sonja story.

In the end I’ve decided to do the No-Prize Shuffle - take the stance that both series were about the same Claw and formed a single continuity with the previous appearances, and offer various hypotheses and hacks as to how it all can fit together. The version that appears in the Creatures Commando LS, however, is considered in this entry not to be the same character, but a descendant. As usual, the hypothetical parts are signaled as thus (or as “No-Prize approaches” or something).

History

To understand the context of the adventures of Valcan of Pytharia, better known under the monicker of Claw the Unconquered, one has to look both at other worlds - as detailed in the boxed sections above - and into the past.

One of Valcan’s distant ancestors dabbled in magic, and sought arcane power to better his beleaguered world. Things then inevitably went wrong and involved a demon.

One account is that the demon tried to possess the researcher, using a mistake in the ritual. Using desperate counterspells, the man repelled the demon, but wasn’t entirely successful. Part of the demon’s essence remained trapped into his hand. As usual with void things, this meant that the ancestor’s hand soon mutated into something bestial and repugnant.

Another account is that the Valcan’s ancestor didn’t even botch his spell casting - but a demon looking for power happened to perform the exact same Ritual at the exact same time in one of the seven voids. The two Rituals interacted, and as the two magicians reached into the small portal they had opened, they found themselves grasping each other’s hand. The fluke attracted the attention of both the shadow deities and the light gods. Since both ritualists were behaving in ways judged inappropriate by their masters, they were cursed to have their touching hands switched. This version may have been a lie concocted by a Shadow-God, though.

In either case, the evil power of the demon hand grew very slowly - over several generations, since it was discovered that the trait passed from parent to child (or possibly specifically from father to son), with the demonic essence passing from the parent’s demon hand to the child’s upon his death.

I fought (for) the Law

Generations later, the demon hand was potent enough to interest the gods of chaos and order. The law-aligned god, the Lords of Elder Light, decided that the next demon hand bearer would be their champion in the Known World, since a champion able to use the power of chaos to fight chaos seemed to be a pretty sweet idea. However, the shadow-gods foresaw this, and their main agent in Pytharia - Prince Occulas of the Yellow Eye - received omens that a man with a bestial hand would be his downfall.

Occulas’s men scoured Pytharia and eventually found one Kregar of Kanon Wood, the current bearer of the hand. Unsuspecting, Kregar was willing to defend his good name in court from the strange accusations of regicidal plot, but the corrupt Occulas’s servant murdered him “while attempting to flee”, and then executed his wife as a witness of the murder. The assassin didn’t see Kregar’s baby, though, and the infant’s tiny demon hand was soon possessed by the demonic essence.

(One flashback depicts an unearthly hand reaching for the baby and mutating his mitt, but this is a misreading of the original scene where the infant already has a demon hand.)

At this point the law gods whisked little Valcan to their realm, and as he grew up they trained him as the ultimate warrior to serve as their champion. They also gave him a special gauntlet to contain the demonic influence of the hand, and forged a magical sword for him - called Moonthorn. When the adult Claw was ready, the gods sent him to the balance world to win the struggle for the multiverse - but the shadow-gods were aware of Claw’s existence and bollixed the teleportation. Claw did return from the realm of Elder Light to Pytharia, but without his sword or memory and close to Ichar, the throne-city ruled by now-King Occulas. Furthermore, Occulas received further omens about a man with a demon hand, and let it know far and wide that he would pay handsomely for his head.

Sun-bronzed barbarian wanderer

Not knowing who he was or that he had a mission, Valcan started wandering in the Ichar area until a waitress accidentally uncovered his demon-paw. There were bounties, informers and guards - and being hounded by corrupt lawmen and betrayed at every turn greatly soured Valcan on the people of Pytharia. With the man with the demon hand now identified, wanted posters started featuring Valcan’s name and likeness.

Fleeing Ichar, Valcan ran across more traitors and some deadly wonders. The desperate inhabitants of the cloud city, the Golden Ones, attempted to sacrifice Claw to repower the enchantment keeping them alive and their wondrous city aloft - but the barbarian escaped. He met with a centauress, but the hapless mare had been lied to by agents of Occulas and thought that she was a human woman cursed into the form of a centauress. Being no fighter, she allied with Claw on her quest to recover her presumed humanity, and turned against him in despair due to the lies she had been fed.

Valcan would finally come to encounter a person he could trust - Ghilkyn, Prince of the Thousand Hills, a green-clad adventurer from another world. At the same time, Occulas was intensifying his efforts to kill the man with the demon hand, and had the chaos giant n’Hglthss the Damned summoned close to Claw and Ghilkyn. It soon became apparent that the giant would randomly kill thousands as it aimlessly shambled across the world it had been let loose on.

Though Valcan was reluctant to save the unreliable Pytharians, the altruistic Ghilkyn convinced him to embark on a quest to find a weapon that could harm n’Hglthss. An oracle, Asvitar the Burning Man, told them that the weapon they needed was the sword Moonthorn and that it belonged to Claw in the first place.

As is traditional, Moonthorn had been handed over to a servant of the Shadow-Gods residing in a pocket dimension in one of the chaotic void realms, and the talisman that could access this dimension, the Grimstone, had been broken into three fragments. As occasional assaults by mutated monsters conjured by Occulas’s court mage continued, Claw and Ghilkyn quested.

They stole the eyes from a sentient oracular statue to pay for the first fragment, took the second fragment from an outcast youth who had established himself as a summoner after stumbling upon a necromancer’s tomb, and found the third fragment in a magical city under a lake, inhabited by peace-loving humans who had mastered the elements. With the assembled Grimstone talisman, Claw and his demon hand defeated Mahan K‘handra, the guardian of Moonthorn. Returning to confront n’Hglthss with Ghilkyn’s help, Claw triumphed. The demon giant was slain before he could ravage yet another settlement - but in this moment of triumph the barbarian warrior was whisked back to the plane of the Gods of Elder Light.

Showdowns

The divinities of law welcomed their agent back, and told him what his background was and why he had forgotten about it. Claw of Pytharia didn’t react particularly well, however, breaking Moonthorn and telling the gods that he would be no one’s pawn and didn’t feel elated to learn that he had been raised a weapon since before he was even born.

Claw left and returned to Pytharia. After a chance encounter with the necromancers Those Who Abide, he returned to Ichar to kill King Occulas of the Yellow Eye. After destroying the King and his castle Valcan left - the parents he had never known had been avenged, but his heart was not much lighter.

Claw rode on, unwittingly getting caught in the war between the realms of Boske and Kyfirth. He decided to work for the Kyfirthians since they were hiring, but other mercenaries stole his gauntlet and fled to sell it. Claw decided that he did not need the glove and could counter the demon claw’s bloodlust using his naked willpower. However, that didn’t work at all - Claw killed and maimed at the least provocation and eventually turned against his own trainees, massacring everyone around him as he went berserk during a battle.

Horrified and wanting to be free from such possessions, Claw cut off his demon hand with an axe, cauterising the wound in a fire. He then resumed his travel as an amputee, his condition often resulting in mockery from the cruel inhabitants of the Known World - and thus, quite often, in shed blood.

One such brawl attracted the enmity of an entire village, and to avoid being lynched Valcan agreed to work for a woman called Trysannda, whom the locals greatly feared. Trysannda wanted to hire Claw to kill the wizard who had taught her sorcery, but Claw was less than enthusiastic about it — especially since he was preoccupied with the feeling that something had been shadowing him for days.

What was following Valcan was his disembodied hand, who soon stealthily reattached itself to his stump as he slept. Fearing that the next murderous urge from the reattached demon hand would come soon, Claw started looking for his stolen oraculum gauntlet. Trysannda’s conjuration were invaluable in that quest, and they did track the thieves down.

However, the mercenaries had already sold the gauntlet to the main sorcerer in the area - Dalivar the Unethical, the same man Trysannda wanted to see dead. Claw and his companions managed to confront the wizard, recover the gauntlet and narrowly flee with their lives. Running in the dark dungeons, they found themselves trapped among insane mutants under the wizard’s fortress, in the Lair of Lunacy. What happened next is unrevealed.

Unconquered

(Another Claw story was published a few years later, though it started where the published books had ended, with Claw chopping off his hand - the unpublished stories with Trysannda chronicled above couldn’t be taken into account. The continuity issue is trivial, though.)

After further lone wanderings, and possibly another attempt to hack off his demon hand that ended in failure and stealthy reattachment, Claw was contacted anew by the Gods of Elder Light. They offered Moonthorn again, plus a helmet, and encouraged him to return to Ichar to take power and reign as a just king. His alternative being a life of aimless wandering, Valcan agreed to the deal.

When Valcan again came to Ichar, the city was being besieged by armies from the void - reportedly, infernal forces had been trying to take Ichar ever since Claw had killed Occulas. Seeing Valcan, the leader of the demonic hordes removed his own magical gauntlet, showing him a human hand at the end of his demonic arm - the creature stated that he was the demon whose hand had been allegedly exchanged with Valcan’s ancestor generations ago.

The two fought until a defender of Ichar, one Shalieka, told them that it wouldn’t solve their hand problem. She offered to conduct a ritual that would allow the most worthy of the two to erase the curse, and result in the death of the other in the jaw of the god of death. Man and demon agreed to her offer, and Valcan was the one who emerged alive ; their leader gone, the demon hordes departed.

Valcan’s new hand, belonging to an ancestor long since dead, crumbled to dust. This was apparently the goal. Shalieka and others were secretly agents of the Shadow-Gods, and it all had been a plan to deprive Claw of his greatest curse and asset - explaining the incredibly convenient coincidences such as Shalieka just happening to know the proper ritual. The demon with a human hand may also have been a catspaw fed a false story.

What happened next is unrevealed, but when Valcan appeared again he had the webbed dragon hand.

She-Devil with a sword

(The next appearance features a Claw with the same backstory as the original Claw, but with less impressive agility and intelligence, minor regenerative powers, and operating in a different milieu. Our No-Prize hypotheses are that the regenerative powers explained the different characterisation and lowered abilities (see the “Demon’s blood !” boxed section), and that the setting was a “mild” chaos void between Claw’s Known World and the Hyborean past of Marvel’s Earth-616 (see the “Fifteen worlds” boxed section).)

When Valcan was next seen, he was wandering in the wasteland between Hyborea and Pytharia. Those are forsaken lands rife with murderous banditry and little else, and quite probably a plane of chaos - and are part of the Northern steppes on the map reproduced in this entry.

The demon blood from the hand had further colonised Valcan’s body, perhaps in part thanks to the chaotic influence of the land. Valcan was bereft with constant, harrowing nightmares where he was ravaging, slaughtering, killing, raping, burning all sorts of settlements. He also saw himself killing a fetching woman warrior with red hair on several occasions.

Worn and haggard from the nightmares and demon blood, Valcan considered making another attempt at hacking his demon hand off, though it seemed that this time he meant to bleed to death and die free of taint. As he was considering this he was beset by one of the numerous groups of local bandits - and met with the woman he had dreamed of, as Red Sonja was riding by and decided to help since without Claw’s presence the bandits would have attacked her instead.

Sonja took Claw with her to her destination - the capital of the small, impoverished kingdom of Brissendyn, near the not-quite-border between Kyfirth and the steppes. Sonja had already been there years before with fellow Hyrkanian warrior Thanador, and had allied with the teenaged king Älgren and his wizard Baxla to repel a horde of berserkers from razing everything.

As the two swordbearers reached Brissendyn, they saw that it was now wallowing in chaos and misery ; the young king was long dead and the hostile locals told Sonja that the wizard had taken over. The two warriors repelled an assault by the lawless locals, and the wizard sent in a pack of elephant-sized chaos hounds. Sonja had to knock Claw out and drag him away from a battle they couldn’t win, as he was being overcome by demonic bloodlust. The Brissendynian military pursued, and when they cornered them Claw, tired of having his problems impact the lives of others, tried to die in battle. He grabbed the champion of the wizard, a man tall like two tall men, and hurled himself and his surprised victim off a cliff.

The hand forced Valcan to save himself. Dejected and seeing that Sonja had been captured, he doubled back toward Brissendyn to free her - but came to realise upon riding into town that it was the setting for his recurrent nightmares of carnage.

Sonja’s capture was a trap - though she had assumed that Baxla was the one who had grown corrupt, it was actually her compatriot Thanador who had learned sorcery and had become an agent of chaos. Using rituals related to the one Valcan’s ancestor performed long ago (the “Unconquerable Conjuration”), Thanador had deliberately exchanged his two arms for demon arms whose hands looked exactly like Claw’s. Thanador wanted to confront Claw to finish corrupting him, which would make the Pytharian his slave.

Though the dazed Claw resisted for long minutes, Thanador eventually succeeded in corrupting him through his hand and turn him against Sonja, whose death would mark Claw’s abandon of his humanity. However Sonja managed to sever Valcan’s demon hand and both warriors turned against Thanador. Claw’s demon hand was burned along with Thanador’s body - but after Sonja left, Valcan realised with a shock that a new one was regrowing from the stump.

Mad world

Claw continued to travel away from Pytharia, though not toward Sonja’s Hyborea. He eventually came to a new area - one with signs of civilisation roughly similar to Pytharia, and speaking the same language, but otherwise different from the Known World.

Having grown tired of being called “Claw” as it reminded him of his infernal appendage and how he had nearly killed Sonja and succumbed to darkness, he adopted the name “Valcan Scaramax” under unknown circumstances - it is possible that it is some sort of honorary title he earned during an unchronicled adventure, a word meaning “foreigner”, or somesuch. When he was seen anew, he was one of the numerous mercenaries of the kingdom of Rotha, hired to war against neighbouring tribes since the slothful Rothans couldn’t be bothered.

Unbeknownst to him, Claws’s severed demon hand had survived the bonfire in Brissendyn and fled. It followed Valcan from afar, and kept killing as it worked with the blood and meat to generate a cloned body of Valcan to bear it. The creature seemed considerably more savage and chaotic - less calculating and mature - than Claw’s hand usually was, and just indulged in the endless carnage of everyone it encountered.

(Where Valcan is at this point, and why he’s now called Valcan Scaramax, is unrevealed. The world where the action of this story takes place has some interesting characteristics, however :

It is a bleak, tired, dreary world with a lawless quality ; there are forces defending the law but these are weak and pedestrian. Though they have the trappings of badass knightly orders and monasteries of warrior monks, they can’t really get traction, are fading out into mediocrity and are but meat for the beast. In some ways it’s not unlike Stalker’s world.
There is no reason to assume that this place is not the same one as where the adventure with Red Sonja occurred - only farther to the West.
The history of this place is that it was once dominated by awful magical aliens, the Shades - but the human cast those out in a rebellion culminating a terrible, horrible battle. The gates to the place of exile of the aliens are at the edge of the known world, and part of the problem is fools and occultists worshipping the alien things to obtain magical power. This, too, is essentially the situation on Stalker’s world, and is reminiscent of the situation on Starfire’s world.
How that fits within the situation of the Fifteen Worlds is just too open to interpretation. We suggest sticking with our No-Prize explanation that this place is the same as the one with Brissendyn and is a “mild” plane of chaos that superficially resembles a normal world. In this context, that the forces of law there are weak and can only gain reprieves from complete domination by void horrors that are going to obliterate them in most circumstances makes perfect sense.)

Claw was recruited by a witch named Satarina Kal Quillion, a demonist who wanted to ally with the Shades to rule as Empress. She explained to Claw that his demon hand could be a key component to a ritual to open the way for the Shades to return. Claw agreed to work for her - his somewhat desperate reasoning being that, if his hand held such power, then it could be used as a bartering piece with the Shades and he might convince them to take it away.

Brusquely leaving his mercenary employ, Valcan was joined by three other sellswords working for the witch - three cousins who had been recruited in large part because they were secretly werewolves. Satarina made one last recruitment - after Valcan told her that his hand had been chopped off some months back, she guessed that the severed paw would still be active and what its likely undertaking would be. She found the hand after it had massacred yet another village, using the blood and meat to build itself a clone body based on Valcan’s - though with a demonic cast. Satarina told the creature that the Shades where its fathers, and the savage and immature thing decided to also travel to the place of ritual so the Shades would reward it for freeing them. The battered, ragged forces of law tried to stop the Claw-thing, but it massacred them at every turn.

Satarina thus no longer needed Valcan,, and decided to kill him - but it didn’t work and Claw used the demon hand to somehow strangle her astral form, forcing her to break contact for a while. Now realising that his hopes of bartering with evil gods were a fool’s endeavour, the Unconquered decided to put an end to this and intercept Satarina’s new agent. When he discovered the thing loosely looking like him, he grew furious and attacked it, but the ritual was already too far underway.

To his shock, Valcan discovered that he and everyone else had been mistaken as to the nature of the Shades - while Satarina, the demonic Claw doppelgäger and others expected something akin to the evil god Dgrth of Stalker’s world, the Shades where gibbering Things Man Was Not Meant To Know with a different form of sapience. The enormous god-thing H‘kothadaztlonta Rzahl led his host of sacrilegious alien things to ravage everything, and the first being they tore apart was the warped clone.

The Shades spared Satarina and Valcan Scaramax for some unknowable reason, but they were dragged, haggard and in chains, along with other human slaves spared for some unguessable purpose. What happened next remains unrevealed.

Swords against the Devil

(The next appearances of Claw are impossible to place, since there’s next to no context to work with. Though they were published after the episodes chronicled so far, the Claw they depict seem a bit closer to the original, so from Claw’s point of view they may have occurred before he entered the Central Steppes. For this article we’ll assume that the Time Master appearance occurred before the Wonder Woman appearance, but this is completely arbitrary.)

Claw was briefly encountered by Rip Hunter when interference threw the Time Master through the timestream at random, landing him pretty much at the feet of Claw’s horse. Claw was operating in a barren, morbid milieu that may have been somewhen in New Earth’s past, though it’s impossible to place. He had just been hired by impoverished villagers to kill the wizard Serhatuu, a conqueror himself dabbling in time travel and with an ambitious notion of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Hunter allied with Claw after explaining that he wasn’t a wizard, and the Time Master and his allies opposed and defeated Serhatuu to stop his attempt to steal the first atomic bomb in 1945. Though Claw was very wary of Hunter and his allies, he sensed the nobility of Superman and agreed to trust him, in particular when time came to return to his home world.

This Claw wasn’t as cunning and quick as the Claw seen in the original stories. It is possible that it was the original Claw with a problem (a renewed demon blood infestation would match quite well with observed performance) though on re-reading I am increasingly prone to considering that it was one of Claw’s first descendant on New Earth - since as noted above we know that the demon hand has been on Earth since at least the Xth century. As usual, there’s no way to tell.

A man who very likely was the original Claw was later recruited by three other adventurers - though as noted it is impossible to place the event in Claw’s personal chronology.

The swordbearers Princess Diana of Themyscira, Stalker and Prince Beowulf of the Geats were specifically looking for Claw the Unconquered across the dimensions, since they needed his help for a Ritual that would destroy Dgrth, a hell-lord possibly tied to the void dimensions of the Fifteen Worlds. The initial encounter went poorly as Claw reacted thinking that it was an ambush, but the three powerful warriors subdued him long enough to talk. Claw was reluctant to help, not seeing why he should bother with saving worlds, but the noble and charismatic Beowulf convinced him to join the party and he came to respect Diana’s bravery and incredible skill.

During the confrontation with Dgrth, the situation went south as Stalker betrayed the party - and Beowulf was badly wounded protecting Diana’s back from Stalker. The daughter of Themyscira had to engage Dgrth solo, leaving Claw behind to tend to Beowulf’s wound and fight off Grendel, Beowulf’s great enemy and now Dgrth’s servant. What happened is unrevealed - perhaps Claw managed to fight Grendel despite the creature’s immense strength, then trick it into falling off the nearby world’s edge, or perhaps Grendel just followed Dgrth in an attempt to help him. Thanks to Claw, the great Beowulf survived ; Stalker also survived as Beowulf had deduced what Stalker’s plan was and asked Claw not to beat him to death.

Diana returned with Dgrth’s severed head, Stalker agreed to help, and the four swordbearers completed the ritual, plunging their blades into the Devil’s eyes and apparently destroying it.

Description

People see Valcan as a dark-maned, half-clothed giant. He is usually seen in barbarian attire wearing a crimson gauntlet on his right hand and a good broadsword.

Claw’s powerful body is sun-bronzed - in fact, he’s occasionally coloured with the same red-ish skin tone used in comics to signify a Native American character. This bronzed skin tone is different from that of most people around him, and while he has generic European facial features he doesn’t seem to grow significant facial hair. Some later stories go all the way and portray him with typical comic-book-Native-American features and hair, but that’s the minority. Claw himself noted that he wasn’t sure that he was of the same race as most other humans in Pytharia.

The original edition of Who’s Who in the DC Universe lists Claw at 6‘5” and 274 lbs., but such proportions were not observed in any of the stories.

Personality

Valcan does not remember who he is. He became aware while wandering in a desert, his only possessions being a good broadsword, a crimson gauntlet, some gold and a gnawing sense of unquiet destiny. He is essentially a loner. And make no mistake, he is a grim barbarian.

Valcan is half-naked, long-haired and not terribly talkative, but when he speaks he doesn’t express himself like the stereotypical barbarian warrior. He’s articulate and speaks elegantly, with something of a theatral manner like an character in a XVIIth century play - but in mostly modern English, not pseudo-Shakesperian English like Marvel’s Thor. Verily. Later appearances have him speak in a more modern fashion and accentuate the grumpiness.

Valcan’s favourite exclamation is “Soth !” - the name of the god of chance. Or rather it was - by the time he fought for Satarina, he had grown convinced that Soth was dead. This may have been true in a sense, since in our interpretation he was fighting on planes too steeped in chaos for the Gods of Elder Light to reach him.

Reluctant hero

One of Claw’s characterisation hooks is that he’d rather not act heroically. He doesn’t really see the point of saving the sort of people he meets, he’d rather not get involved in problems he just stumbles across, he doesn’t want to be seen as any sort of saviour by desperate people who can’t fight, etc. He generally tries to project the impression that he’s an amoral, cynical hardarse. Claw seems to genuinely regret having a conscience he can but seldom ignore, feeling chained by it whereas he’d prefer having his freedom.

He’s not even much of a mercenary - he agrees to sell his sword for money, knowledge or other things he needs, but his needs are modest. He has no interest in being rich, isn’t the sort to burn money on pleasures, and his need for knowledge is usually restricted to containing his demon hand.

However, Valcan’s instincts are those of law, not chaos. He doesn’t like admitting it, but seeing innocents suffer, those without power treated without consideration, destruction in the name of personal interest and the like anger him and he feels he should do something about it. His common sense tells him not to, however, and there will usually be hesitation and a need for an outside party or event to coax Claw to intervene. He will argue against it, pretend that he doesn’t care, start riding away, insist that if he ends up doing some good then it’ll be incidental and not because he’s a hero, etc. - but he can always be convinced not to act like a callous mercenary only looking out for number one.

Part of Claw’s attitude about refusing to be a hero stems from the poor respect for law in his world. Pytharia is in balance, and most people are greedy and trying to subvert what laws do exist for personal benefit. Claw discovered all this as he strolled, an amnesiac, throughout Pytharia, and these experiences led him to consider that these people weren’t really worth saving and would be better left to their own devices to doom themselves. In the end, though, he cannot really let them do that, especially when it comes to children, women, outcasts and other people at the mercy of those who have a modicum of strength and power.

Reign of the demon claw

The other big hook is the demon hand. The hand seems to be able to subtly manipulate his temper. Without the protection of his gauntlet, Claw will be filled with cruelty, evil and disgust. He is cursed ; he knows it and doesn’t like it. Originally the hand is used as a bit of a deus ex machina, but as time goes by and its power grows it becomes more and more sinister and eventually veers the genre of Claw stories toward horror.

How badly the demon paw influences Claw is quite variable - in the original story he’s OK as long as he wields the gauntlet, and when the gloved hand does something Claw doesn’t want it too it’s almost always to save his life - such as grabbing the dagger of a man about to plunge his dagger into Valcan’s back and driving it into the would-be assassin’s heart in one fluid move. However, without the gauntlet it makes Valcan susceptible to murderous rages and killing frenzies, and the life of his companions is clearly in danger when Claw does not have his gauntlet.

As the influence of the hand asserts itself, the blood thirst becomes increasingly bad even with the gauntlet. At the peak of the hand’s influence, on what is thought to be a void plane, Valcan was beset by constant visions of carnage and cruel slaughter at his hand, and was becoming unable to tell the difference between these visions and reality. After the hand is severed by Sonja, he recovers control and the hand once more becomes an asset under his control, though it evidences a markedly lower level of initiative.

Valcan seems to become more violent, more hostile, more xenophobic and more prone to wanting to satisfy his carnal urges as time goes. He becomes less of a crafty wanderer and reluctant hero, and more of an amoral, brutal barbarian who’s out for blood, wenches and gold. While this is presumably just writing Claw as a stock fantasy barbarian character and the cliché evolves, a simple No-Prize hypothesis is that it’s the influence of the hand wearing him down and increasingly making him more of a champion of chaos than a champion of law. By the time he allies with Satarina, he’s clearly serving evil in the foolish hope that it will rid him of his claw - though the subsequent experience with the Shades likely shocked this out of his system.

Still, one must point out that Valcan always had a rash tendency to take whatever he needed, and damn the consequences - for instance in one of the original stories he was about to take the last Grimstone fragment even knowing that it would doom an underwater city to extinction. The difference is that back then he was easily convinced not to carry out unethical act - usually by being talked to by Ghilkyn, but sometimes just by thinking about the consequences. As he toils in what seem to a void plane and there’s scant ethical persons around and a clear sense of despair, these inhibitions disappear.

Have sword, will travel

In the original stories, Claw has a certain unflappable and open-minded quality. He grumbles about sorcery and corruption, but he doesn’t really mind associating with strange creatures, travelling to other dimensions and encountering strange and disgusting things. He adapts very quickly to the oddest surroundings and associates. This is in part because back then he had a very clear sense of purpose (to discover his own past during his earliest career, then to avenge his parents, then to recover the oraculum gauntlet), and his pragmatism means that he just deals with the weirdness.

Later on, as Valcan is portrayed as more of a stock barbarian and less of a noble savage, he acquires a certain hostility toward sorcery, strange persons, women as anything but sex objects (though he will come to treat powerful warriors like Sonja or Diana as equals), etc. He’s also not a smart, and much less likely to come up with lateral thinking solutions. His manner of speech is still heroic-fantasy-ish, but is significantly less theatral.

One constant is that Valcan feels a profound repugnance at being anybody’s tool or catspaw - he’s just too attached to his freedom. He’ll balk at any indication that he’s being figuratively strongarmed into an alliance, though alliances of convenience and necessity are fine. He’ll agree to serve as a mercenary, but no one buys Valcan’s loyalty and if he feels like deserting to pursue another activity, he’ll just ride away. And of course he doesn’t want to project the impression that he’s constrained by a code of ethics - and as time goes by, this gets easier since his law-aligned ethics are eroding under the demon hand’s pressure.

Writeup updated and expanded on the 7th of May, 201

Wonder Woman

Main article: Ends of the Earth (DC Comics)

Claw's first in continuity appearance in over twenty years occurs in Wonder Woman #21 (August 2008), where Wonder Woman and Stalker recruit Claw and Beowulf for a mission to slay the Demon Lord Dgrth.

Justice League: Cry for Justice

Prometheus uses a missile derived from one of Claw's gauntlets (described as originating 'circa 13,902 BC') to neutralize Firestorm in

Justice League: Cry for Justice #6 (March 2010).

Time Masters: Vanishing Point

Other versions

Red Sonja /Claw The Unconquered: Devil's Hands #4. Variant cover by Jim Lee.

John Chan

Swamp Thing

Main article: Swamp Thing

Alternate versions of Claw have had cameo appearances in titles such as Sandman #52 (1993), Swamp Thing #163 (1996) and Starman (vol.2) #55 (1999).

Red Sonja

References

^ Jump up to:^a ^b Wallace, Dan (2008), "Claw the Unconquered", in Dougall, Alastair, The DC Comics Encyclopedia, New York: Dorling Kindersley, p. 84, ISBN 0-7566-4119-5, OCLC 213309017
Jump up^ McAvennie, Michael; Dolan, Hannah, ed. (2010). "1970s". DC Comics Year By Year A Visual Chronicle. Dorling Kindersley. p. 163. ISBN 978-0-7566-6742-9. "David Michelinie's pen and Ernie Chan's pencils and inks provided the magic for this fantasy series that introduced Claw the Unconquered, a barbaric outlander with a deformed claw-like right hand."
Jump up^ Time Masters: Vanishing Point #1 (September 2010)
Jump up^ http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/niven/142/recycleb/rb46.html"Claw the Unconquered: Cliche and the Perfect Genre Piece" An Essay on Claw the Unconquered #1
Jump up^ Red Sonja #36 (2008)

Wednesday, February 12, 2014