Savage Dragon's Surprise Villain: Who Is The Claw?

On the final page of yesterday's Savage Dragon #184, it was revealed that the villain behind the recent spate of resurrections in the title was in fact a monstrous, yellow-skinned character who calls himself The Claw. If you're like me, Claw looked awful familiar, but you couldn't quite place why--but in our commentary yesterday, Erik Larsen put two and two together. Created by Plastic Man creator Jack Cole in 1939, Claw is a villain most commonly associated with the Lev Gleason-published Golden Age Daredevil, a character who appears regularly in Savage Drago and who also appears as the "Death Defying 'Devil" in Project Superpowers. "Finding a look for the Claw was a struggle," Larsen told ComicBook.com. "He's a classic villain that fought the Golden Age Daredevil and he's just about as offensive a racial stereotype as one can imagine. My attempt here was to push him enough into the realm of monsters so that he because more of a monster and less of an offensive racial stereotype. His design was pretty inconsistent throughout the Golden Age so I looked around for more at instances where he veered less human in order to make him look like more of a monster. It was no easy task as he looked pretty ridiculous much of the time." According to a Wiki dedicated to public domain comic book characters, Claw appeared in a total of fewer than fifty Golden Age issues, but has been referenced, and seen in flashback, in the public domain superhero team-up book Project Superpowers at Dynamite. Like Dr. Doom or Queen Bee, this villain leads his own country and, therefore, has considerable resources at his disposal; he's also been depicted as being able to manipulate his size. "He has other ill-defined abilities as well which are dependent on the phases of the moon," says the Wiki. He also has a Giant Boring Vehicle that allows him to travel the world undetected by doing so deep underground. After having appeared in the pages of Silver Streak Comics for a while, he found himself facing off against Daredevil--after which point he migrated to the pages of that character's book and stayed there until his death. Years later, he would appear briefly in Captain Battle, Jr.'s comics, but those tales appear to have been ignored by Project Superpowers, and likely will be by Larsen as well, to pursue the more interesting narrative of his return from apparent death.