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Claw the Unconquered: Cliche and the Perfect Genre Piece

A recent search-and-locate mission aimed at turning up something bad enough to warrant inclusion in one or more Truly Awful Comics columns brought me a number of promising pieces, but only one (New Guardians #1) that really delivered the badness I sought that day. Nonetheless, one piece of considerable potential for that essential "ugh" feeling came out of this particular set of purchases: DC Comics' Claw the Unconquered, from the mid-seventies, a work that strongly suggested that someone had captured every exhausted-by-1975 cliche from the sword-and-sorcery comics of that decade and concentrated them in a single work.

As material for a Truly Awful Comics column, the book mostly disappointed me. Its failures centered around not inspiring interest or imagination, not in induced ill-feeling and the masochistic thrill that a really wonderfully bad piece can produce. So, with a stack of other assorted stuff that managed to suck some eighty US dollars out of my traffic-worn wallet, I set the book aside, only consulting it long enough for a single interested read-through and a quick scan of a Hostess superhero ad typical of the comics of the day.

Some time would pass, and ultimately the realization would occur that, if this very formulaic and derivative piece did not inspire the kind of aesthetic malaise that I sought, rendering it devoid of the right stuff to populate a column for one Quarter Bin feature, it nonetheless had something to tell the world in a different feature.

It struck me that a sufficiently-cliched piece could well serve as a textbook to define a genre or a moment in a comics form, and Claw the Unconquered #1 did this very well.

The Example

We could describe this book with the name Claw the Unconquered #1, although the entire logo reads, somewhat long-windedly, "The World Trembles before the Blade of...Claw the Unconquered." Credits attribute this piece to Ernie Chua (artist) and David Michelinie (writer). The cover date of June 1975 puts it somewhere in the middle of the Ford administration, for those of us so old that we remember both this period of comics and the public events that ran concurrently.

For purposes of synopsis, note the following: Claw wanders into town, where bandits, making the obvious mistake of viewing his 72-inch pectoral muscles as a sign of weakness, set upon him as a helpless out-of-towner, whereupon Claw tosses one of them through a window. A bar-wench of improbable beauty and impractically scanty attire fusses over his red gauntlet, pulling it off and exposing Claw's source of a name: He has one hand that looks somewhat like a cross between a mammalian paw and a reptilian claw. Claw drinks and leaves, coming across yet another set of bandits - obviously operating under orders - who fail to learn the lesson Claw taught the previous set about the correlation between attacking red-skinned strangers with enormous pectoral muscles and getting one's buns kicked.

The leader of the latter, ill-fated band of sword-and-sorcery bagmen adjourns to Castle Darkmorn, where his evil master Occulas of the Yellow Eye - and, sadly enough, king of the joint - awaits news of his failure with displeasure, and has him killed. Then King Occulas flashes back to his exposure to a prophesy about a dragon-handed hero who stands as the only obstacle between him and the inevitable prize of world domination.

Occulas reflects on having killed anyone who got in his way, including Claw's unfortunate father (who bore a mangled hand similar to Claw's own), then points out how his possession of the Eye of Kann (perhaps a joke about Jeannette Kahn), a red fig-shaped gem, makes him invincible.

The bar maid from the earlier scene thereupon leads Claw away from the gangs of assassin-goons and into an abandoned temple of Kann, in which Claw finds a giant plant thing to fight. Claw destroys the eye, Occulas, and his sword all in the process of doing away with a bit of recyclable lawn trimmings in the form of the giant plant, then relieves the corpse of Occulas of the much better sword it bore. Then Claw ditches the babe, gets on his horse, and takes off toward the horizon, not even waiting for a sunset to vanish into.

All in all, such a story provides an excellent model for a seventies sword-and-sorcery concept, even if it became, in an early stage, trite from overused concepts. Nonetheless, it has the things it needs for a proper genre definition to show through; future creators might build something worthwhile on the same kind of derivative platform from which Michelinie and Chua began here.

The Defining Traits

Seventies sword-and-sorcery pieces often used a model of a hero not greatly modified from what would work in Homeric literature. Begin with a hero of great prowess, perhaps connected strongly to a local and reportedly backward culture, not especially loyal to persons of power but frequently attached to a heroic code greater than persons. Take this hero out of his native element and have him act to fulfill a vow or a prophesy, while some older figure, weakened with age or corruption, attempts to undermine the destiny that surrounds the character. Confront the hero with a future that may involve the toppling of the current political order or his own destruction on levels much deeper than the future.

And, for a setting, place him somewhere men resolve conflicts by force of their ability to use hand weapons driven by no more than their own muscles in an environment where magical forces contend for dominance. Populate this place with fantastical and frequently horrifying creatures often shaped or distorted by magical forces and sometimes, but not always, drawn from folklore.

Furthermore, through whatever stretch of storytelling allows it, oppose gangs of steel-clad ruffians for him to overpower, whether through the vehicle of the hero's profession as a mercenary, or the more trite mechanisms of robbers / kidnappers / angry mobs striking out against the inherent tyranny of huge pectoral muscles. Where necessary, insert a scheming and disloyal female faking affection for the hero; perhaps some monster that suggests a grotesque perversion of nature; and possibly a magical weapon that can serve, when required, as deus ex machina in future tales.

Then, with all these components in place, proceed to grow beyond such formulaic genre definitions, or, if inspiration does not appear, mark time within the context of a textbook piece that defines a school of comics. Enthusiasm and talent can, but by no means must, eventually redeem such a piece.

Tyrants, Wizards, and Prophecies

A familiarity with the lore of Conan - either that written in prose form by creator Robert E. Howard and successors in the text version of the character or of the Marvel Comics interpretation pioneered by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith - would make aspects of Claw recognizable as part of a pattern of Conan-borrowings that essentially define the entire character.

For instance, though Conan began as a barbarian from the outlands, deterministic forces (such as the destiny writers can impose upon characters and can subsequently foreshadow for effect) pointed to his eventual assumption of a throne.

Claw's own destiny implied a similar pattern, though this destiny, established from the first pages of the first issue of his short-lived series, pointed to the latter, derivative barbarian as the overthrower and destroyer of tyrants. Said prophesy inspired the antagonistic wizard of the early tale in precisely the fashion that the Biblical king Herod's fears of a coming rival to the crown of Israel, and the ambitious ill-wisher thus sought out the dragon-handed figure fortunes suggested would someday destroy him.

With the lack of foresight typical of the entire species of comic-book villains, across multiple genres, this particular wizard overlooked the possibility of more than one dragon-handed figure coming to haunt him, and he had Claw's father murdered in our hero's infancy, little knowing that the helpless and hapless babe would grow up with a similar deformity which he would conceal in a crimson gauntlet (concealing about as well as might, in a later age, a hand-shaped neon sign).

The Hack-and-Slash Routine

Mythical heroes (or gods) like Hercules or Ogma might make do with a hefty piece of wood with which to club their enemies into some kind of pre-civilized meat paste. Or, as heroic tastes became more refined, the likes of Phoebos Apollo might show his finesse with a bow. However, for the sword-and-sorcery hero, little will do but steel, and plenty of it.

Axes have more visual appeal to the artist in some ways, and thus we might note that Conan frequently appeared with huge curved axes that might well rend an ox in a stroke or two. However, the sword remains the heart of much fantasy lore. Swords played prominent roles in Grail romances; swords appeared in tales of the war between heaven and hell in which the Archangel Michael cleft the rebellious Satan in two; and swords, when one does things with them like make them shine or flame, develop a visual appeal that can, in the right circumstances, outdo the less subtle axe.

Thus, while we might note the choice of a sword rather than an axe for Claw somewhat differs from the Conan formula, it nonetheless keeps the character well within the boundaries of traditional interpretations of the wandering soldier-hero.

The Ungallant Loner

One sequence in an ancient Conan comic from the early seventies sticks in the head. Jim Starlin depicted and possibly wrote the piece (not an unlikely prospect, since he had taken writing assignments on books like Captain Marvel that Roy Thomas played the role of writer-of-general-tenure on). Conan had defeated some wizard whose alchemical experimentation had made a river a source of magically mutagenic pollution, and faced at the end the prospect of making a female he had seduced earlier in the tale his regular lady; instead, however, after slowly walking to take the prize offered by grateful city officials, he shoved said female aside and left with a good horse. This scenario, not without precedent in the defining Thomas - Smith Conan run, nonetheless served much to establish the relationship of Conan to the female of the species, a rather instrumental one of convenience and very little respect. Regardless of the demonstrated eloquence of a hero's requited or unrequited love for a female - from various relationships between the knights of Grail romances back, through the millennia, to Hektor's relationship to his wife Hecuba in The Iliad - the notion of confining a hero like Conan, either in prose or comics form, to a conventional male-female relationship didn't fit the fantasy-hero model of the seventies.

One might suspect that derivative pieces would borrow from this approach. And, indeed, Claw's "love 'em and leave 'em" here - in which he didn't even bother to get around to the "love 'em" portion of the equation typical of the cynical and solitary barbarian hero, points back to the Conan definition.

Such an approach can work, but can quickly degenerate into cliche; at the same time, it forces writers to overlook themes like romantic betrayals (as per the Oresteia) or themes of redemption through reuniting with a lost lover (Orpheus myths and too many other pieces to count). Mostly, one might think, that such an attitude from the hero represents less a concession to the hard pragmatism that attaches to the definition of the character and more a kind of appeal to the commitment-fearing sexuality of overly-hormonal adolescent males, a target demographic much obliged both in generations of comics and in the pulps that preceded them.

An Unabashed Apologia

Iterations on my part of the unoriginal nature of this material should not serve to indicate displeasure on my part; actually, I found this piece, lack of new frontiersmanship notwithstanding, a refreshing detour from the normal diet of superhero books of habit or of pieces bought to sustain currency on a plot thread. I found this piece entertaining on a number of levels, including a kind of innocence.

On the one hand, in the modern form, we find comics so derivative that a reader can point out specific issues of specific titles which the material intends, unashamedly, to suggest. For example, much of what appears in Big Bang Comics, whether original to that title or not, plays a kind of pastiche of styles of artists who defined periods of particular books, combined with a very near approach to certain memorable or significant tales from the Silver Age of Comics. On the other hand, we have some material which so dreads the onus of unoriginality that it dabbles sometimes in the thoroughly incomprehensible, and not always with the kind of aesthetic success or critical acclaim that attach to pieces like Grant Morrison's Invisibles.

This piece, however, somewhat represents an attitude one sees less of in modern comics: It demonstrates a kind of shamelessness about presenting cliched material which comes not from a lack of aesthetic or professional ethics, but from an understanding that comics should entertain without taking themselves so seriously that writers and readers attempt to establish their credentials through such material. Michelinie and Chua did not intend to redefine the medium in this book; nor did they intend to present themselves as the cutting edge of their art. They had a much humbler purpose, which, if the material itself can serve to define it, involved telling a story in a comprehensible (and then-popular) milieu with just enough sword fights, monsters, and scantily-clad babes to keep the reader interested.

I've read better comics. But I don't often read comics trying to deliver fun without consideration for how the piece will look on some future resume of the talents involved; and this work reminds me of a general model of comics that a reader could enjoy without having to use the book as a benchmark for setting standards for the art.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 248. Completed 25-APR-2001.