Continuing to shine a light on CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE #1 and the reams of material left homeless and unfinished when Dc was forced to go through a sudden contraction that eliminated titles from the publishing schedule and editors from their jobs. It was a bad moment for the firm, and while some of this material did eventually see print in one form or another, most of it was simply written off. CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE was a homemade set of photocopies of the discarded material bound under new covers and submitted to the Library of Congress in order to secure the copyright to the material.
During the 1970s, sword and sorcery was a hot new genre thanks to the success of Conan the Barbarian over at Marvel, and so every publisher worth his or her salt added a few similar barbarian titles to their line in an attempt to capture a segment of this new audience. One of DC’s attempts, and a really solid attempt at that, was CLAW THE UNCONQUERED, which lasted for a dozen issues before eventually being done in by the DC Implosion. The series was originally to have been titled TALON, but it turned out that Jim Steranko had already secured the legal rights to his own character of that same name, and so the book instead became CLAW.
Claw was a barbarian with a bit of a difference, though: true to his name, his right hand was demonic, the result of a generations-long curse placed upon his family when his forefather attempted to parley with demonspawn. His demon hand pushes Claw to fits of berserker madness, and is partly responsible for his great skill as a swordsman. The series was created by David Michelinie and Ernie Chan, though Chan was gone by the time of these unfinished issues. Instead, the artwork on unpublished issue #13 was by Romeo Tanghal.
As the series had gone on, while it began as a pure sword and sorcery adventure, science fiction elements began to turn up, making CLAW THE UNCONQUERED into something a bit more unique. No doubt this was in response to a general softening of the marketplace’s interest in barbarian adventures–while CONAN continued on in both his regular color comic and the black and white SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN magazine, most other sword and sorcery titles fell by the wayside during this period.
There were two issues of CLAW THE UNCONQUERED in production when the axe fell, so both #13 and #14 were included in CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE #1.
CLAW THE UNCONQUERED #13 was pulled late enough in the process that a letters page had already been assembled for the issue.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 