Comics UK

For those interested in the Steel Claw,this brilliant piece of research by Terry Hooper is worth a look http://professorh.multiply.com/journal/ ... Steel_Claw

Very interesting Captain.
I didn't know I was that old.

I found a 1970 overview of comics some while back, and emailed it to 'Loki', who had a 'Steel Claw' page up on the net. The source was a feature in the trade press:

'In 1962, Fleetway Publications launched Valiant, having decided that they could no longer go on with straight stories. The world was getting too small a place to depict tales of three people stranded on a remote island, pitting their wits against various hostile forces. And so the gimmick stories were introduced.

One of the first of these was 'The Steel Claw', a story about a villainous laboratory assistant whose experiments left him invisible for varying periods. For the purposes of strip, he was given an artificial steel hand which was visible at all times.

The strip was intended as a 15-week story complete in itself but its great reception led to a prolonged run of eight years; the wicked Louis Crandell, laboratory assistant, became, at various subtle stages, the good hero."

I remember that Steel Claw would electrocute himself to become invisible; like climbing a pylon and grabbing the conducting cable! It was a different world. As I remember, he was re-invented and provided with a new claw that fired bullets from the fingers- is this right? There was a view inside his claw, which was like an armoured glove, showing a small panel of buttons. Or was there?

There was. His claw was customised in this way, 'James Bond' style, when he joined a covert government organization called the Shadow Squad. Later on he even became a 'superhero' for a while with his own skin-tight costume!

- Phil R.

Sounds like Iron Hand - the DC Thomson superhero that was absolutely nothing like Steel Claw