I was reading one of your posts that crosslinked to another post about someone named the Grey Claw, but the link wasn't working. What's the Grey Claw all about?
I was planning to hold off talking about him until I could finish translating his comic or wrote a story with him proper, plans I still intend to get around to but are gonna be on ice for a long while. So in the meanwhile, let's finally set the record about this guy.
Said to be the star of Brazil's first horror comic, he is unarguably the first Brazilian supervillain, and I'll make an argument that he may very well be The First Comic Book Supervillain proper, inspired by the pulp master villains but something much different than the drab Fu Manchu clones of the time, something new and costumed and strange and fantastical in ways that were years if not decades ahead of his time. Predating the first recognized American supervillains in comics, at the midpoint between Fu Manchu and Doctor Sivana, between Fantomas and The Joker, between Doctor Quartz and Lex Luthor, there is: The Grey Claw.
Murders, underground connections, secret laboratories, opium dens, a secret society of crime and a mysterious super-villain challenging all of police and society. São Paulo was still in it's quiet beginnings, but even then, it dreamed of being a grand shadowy metropolis, like the ones heard about in movies, pulps and North-American comic books.
And that dream made the success of The Grey Claw series in the 1930s. For months, paulista readers eagerly followed the perils of Inspector Frederic Higgens at the hands of The Grey Claw's semi-anarchist gang, with exotic characters such as the robot Flag and the sensual Dame in Black.
Considered by many to be the first Brazilian horror comic - due to it's plot full of monsters, mummies, grave defilings and mentions of life after death - The Grey Claw is a direct spawn from the seedy and mysterious texts of north-american pulp magazines. Soon, those masked avengers and horrific villains in non-stop action would reach the world of comics, giving birth to the superhero revolution. - The City and it's Monster, by Worney Almeida de Souza
The Grey Claw was the star of a comic published in newspaper A Gazetinha starting July 1937, just short of a full year before Superman's debut in June 1938, and it would run for a hundred installments until wrapping up it's story circa 1939. The same newspaper would eventually debut both Superman and The Phantom (second only to Superman and maybe Batman in terms of imitators worldwide among Golden Age superheroes, and I say maybe because they overlap a bit but The Phantom was definitely the go-to superhero to rip off basically everywhere outside of the States) to Brazilian audiences, running alongside The Grey Claw during his brief run. The strip is a police procedural that gradually turns into a sci-fi horror story, a pastiche of film serials and pulp novels that focuses on the titular strange, powerful masked villain running amok in a seedy metropolitan area, and a police detective's efforts to uncover who is behind said villain.
The basic skeleton of it is a fairly cut-and-dry police procedural with a square-jawed Sherlockian policeman investigating a string of calling-card murders with more suspects and victims picking up along the way. Our heroes are mostly colorless and dull archetypes, although the protagonist Higgins is amusingly dickish at several times and I'll go to bat for the female lead Kay Tornhill, she's a fairly progressive character in spite of limited screentime as the detective's partner (not romantically, she joins the investigation to protect her younger brother from the Claw). She's a skilled fencer / marksman / equestrian / swimmer who doesn't really get to show these talents in the story, but they make a point of bringing it up, and I think Kay's presentation probably did the most in convincing people for decades that this comic was penned by a woman under a male name, because, well just look at her.
But as is Pulp Supervillain Lead tradition, it is the villain who has more than enough charisma to spare to carry us through, and a lot of what makes The Grey Claw feel distinct is that he winds up remixing stock pulp/serial villain traits in novel ways, the result of him making his debut in a fairly new and developing medium and growing stranger as the issues develop as he takes center stage more and more. Everytime he shows up, he brings with him things like televised death traps (television hadn't yet been brought to Brazil), underground torch-lit lairs, rabid ape monsters in chains who used to be humans, and a gigantic automaton who walks around making turkey noises and killing everything in sight unless reigned in by The Grey Claw, who names it "FLAG" and treats him with great fondness as if he were a best friend and a sidekick and a dog all in one and bemoans that one day, he will be able to give his berserk death machine friend the power of speech.
FLAG! FLAG! It is I, FLAG! Calm yourself, FLAG!
My poor FLAG! Some day, I shall give you the usage of speech...
Here's one thing about the character upfront: The story was drawn by Renato Silva (who also did Nick Carter stories) and written by Francisco Armond, but nobody knows who Francisco Armond is. For a while, the most likely candidate was Helena Ferraz, a poet and co-editor/director of the paper who had already published under the male pseudonym Alvaro Armando (named after her two sons), but relatives of hers confirmed it wasn't her, and so currently nobody knows who wrote this. I actually still have no idea who, if anyone, currently owns the rights to The Grey Claw, because although he's had a recent reboot (by the same creator of Doutrinador and in the exact same vibe, which means it's dogshit and I will not entertain it), he's long passed the point where he should be public domain.
The comic was a great success for it's time and would achieve a level of fame none of it's contemporaries would by being reprinted internationally. In 1939, it was reprinted without permission by Mexican editor Sayrol in 1939 and made it's way to European publishers through there. Between 1944-1947 it had a very popular run in Belgian magazine "Le Moustique", and he was adapted to France under the name "La Griffre Grise", which is where I discovered the character while looking for French pulp characters. Unsurprisingly, the character was never credited as a Brazilian creation, and for 50 or so years went almost completely undiscovered by even the most hardcore researchers.
Even in Brazil, nobody knows about this guy, and it was only in 2011, 74 years after his debut, that the character's entire saga was finally collected and reprinted in trade paperback by Editora Conrad. It's not cheap and it's really hard to find and order, completely out of stock in most online stores, but I got it as a birthday gift from my sister a couple years ago. I have it on hand right now to help put this post together.
It's a fairly weird comic that's in many ways aged really poorly but also tapped into some veins superhero comics and future supervillains would take a long while to even approach. The dialogue is a couple steps clunkier than even your average Golden Age comic, almost impenetrably outdated with Portuguese linguistics (a poisoned character saying out loud "Oh no! I've just been narcotized!") and weird malapropist English terms hastily translated and inserted in, and conveying the feel of it is even beyond my own skills at translating. It's a unique time capsule of how Brazil was still adapting to rapidly developing times, recently loosening up from centuries-spanning shackles of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism and with a newfound input of foreign media in pulps and serials and theater, and adapting and developing new subcultures and ways of expression as a result.
This was one of the first times a Brazilian comic would play around this much with USAmerican tropes and archetypes (cultural imports from the USA were all extremely new and viewed as a hot new alternative to European art and culture that had otherwise been the dominant form), a São Paulo-published comic set in a seedy, Depression-choked American metropolis, a big monument of brick and poison and inequality, which is exactly what São Paulo would become. There is something oddly alien and prescient about The Grey Claw because it's rooted in a fictionalized fantasyland idea of 1930s New York, that would nevertheless predate São Paulo's trajectory into becoming the country's big American-Style Urban Center, over the decades later when it would be the USAmericans' turn to tighten those colonialist shackles back on.
The dialogue also makes it pretty funny to read as a result and especially when the villain shows up, because The Grey Claw himself is pretty goddamn funny. Not just funny: I think his characterization is actually pretty damn impressive, and it's certainly the main draw of the thing for me. There's one sequence I'm going to post the whole page to be appreciated. I can't scan it so you'll just have to take my word as is that this is the whole page.
For context: It is revealed that The Grey Claw has been on a mad quest to unlock the mysteries of life and death via a formula that can bring the dead back to life. He monologues quite intensely about having unveiled and unlocked the secrets, saying to FLAG that he was the first step in giving life and intelligence into inanimate matter ("You would be a perfect creation, if only you were able to express your feelings", he says, to the horrid gurgling automaton who murders everything in sight), but that this time, he shall perfect the breath of life.
But it is eventually revealed, when he is exposed as Dr James Stone (a "famed young chemist, one of the most well-liked men around town") after his explosive demise, that he had in fact stolen the formula's recipe from a former partner, Professor Curberry. Curberry was the ape monster he kept chained in the basement, and that he visited in order to whip while it writhed in chains, with the narrative stating The Claw was "blinded by hate" towards him. At the end, it's revealed that Curberry's corpse coming back to life as a half-man-half-ape monster was a side effect of The Grey Claw "getting the dosage wrong", and we're just gonna ignore the can of worms that ending brings to focus on when The Grew Claw actually succeded.
For his test subject, he picked the corpse of the scientist's secretary he murdered within the 2nd strip, over a week well into death, and injects her at the dawn of midnight. And I'm gonna have to transcribe it:
Mid-night at last! The "Claw" begins the grand experiment.
The ghost's hand shakes slightly as he injects the licor of life in the dead woman's arms. And this is the first time the steely nerves of that insensitive creature have ever faltered.
"Twenty four minutes and...she'll be back to life! Ah, this time the triumph will be complete!"
"Will I fail yet again? No, failure is not possible. However, the experiment realized with Curberry was definitive...how horrible it would be if the experiment failed again!"
"It would be horrible! But no! If I fail, I will not allow her to survive...Yes! I shall exterminate her! Curberry and Mac-Flagan were more than enough!"
The minutes drizzle out slowly. As the pointers walk across, the mysterious ghost feels his nervousness grow.
They dedicated an entire page's worth just to The Grey Claw stressing and worrying and having a breakdown over the prospect of his formula not working again. But he does succeed, and the secretary comes back to life devoid of any memories and in great shock. Here's how the "insensitive creature" reacts
Despite his great dominion over his own nerves, the "Claw" can barely repress his restlessness. The living dead woman stumbles around her with a look of fright.
DAME IN BLACK: "What an emptiness in my head! It's all confused, scrambled, obscured!"
THE GREY CLAW: "This time I've won completely, FLAG!"
He later tells her that, with no memories of her own, she might as well not "cling to the past" and instead join him as his "Dame in Black". But in the aftermath of this, while he's busy boasting and jeering that the world belongs to him now, FLAG immediately zeroes in and tries to maul the woman before The Claw shoos him away. And then in the next strip, he writes in his diary about how his two besties are getting along now-
The next day, certain that FLAG would no longer try assaulting the "Dame in Black", the "Claw" penetrates a discreet cabinet next to the laboratory
"My memories...they shall be worth a fortune later..."
"I have triumped! She transcended the throes of death and returned to life, thirty minutes after the injection. She showed herself a bit stunned, undecided, wowed; she spoke, she walked, she fought…yes, she fought the idiot automaton, who was startled by the new companion…But now, they are both great friends."
"I have taught her the process of turning FLAG docile as a lamb. She is of sane mind; her mind has shed, however, all impressions of the "past". My voice, however, brought her memory-"
Did I tell you guys already that, before the police blows the two up, FLAG ultimately mauls The Grey Claw to death while his last words are him desperately trying to get the robot to calm down, saying "It's me!" instead of fleeing? I'm posting like one highlight, but to post all of them would be to post basically every time this character shows up in the story.
(Art by @zanzooeditorial)
There's just such a fascinating mismatch between how the narration and everyone sees him, as this stone cold invincible death-dealer turned death-master who holds the entire country in a grip of terror, and his characterization when he's actually on-screen going about his affairs. The narrative goes through lengths to paint him as an unfeeling soulless monster that is almost patently contradicted with most of what he says and does in-text, which veers widly between pitiable and even sympathetic to, actually worse than if he was fully pragmatic chessmaster genius the police perceives him as, and it's not even really played for laughs, it's more like a side effect of this being published peacemeal over 2 years and shooting for new directions and thus contradicting itself. He's afforded this emotional range that's just really unheard of, not just in the pulp villains he's based on but in all the Golden Age supervillains that came after him, it's something that only really started catching on with Marvel and their attempts to add extra dimension to their villains.
The Grey Claw is a brutal murderer and a cutthroat terrorist who has an innocent woman shot in the heart within the second page, and he's a wisecracking goofball who delighs in showing off his advanced intellect and machinery before his police nemesis. He commands vast invisible communications networks and armies of brutal thugs, and then he writes diaries and plays pranks and poses dramatically. He is a vicious man who turned his former partner into a mutant ape and keeps him locked up and whipped while constantly berating and cursing him ("Ah Ah Ah! I wish your university colleagues could see you now!"), but he did forsake victory and spared his worst enemies from a horrible end to save the life of a woman he liked among them. He is a deeply lonely gothic dweeb who casually engages in constant banter with the monstrous unresponsive automaton, whom he asks for input and talks to and holds tight in moments of emotion or camraderie that is entirely one-sided on his end, he barely restrains it from murdering everything in sight at all times and winds up being mauled to death the second that grip is loosened. He has one friend in the whole entire world and it's the one he made himself.
He is desperately driven to prove himself and have that blasted resurrection formula he's been developing for years work, even though we learn that it was apparently stolen from someone else the whole time and he was just, what, passionately pretending to himself that it was his life's work? We never get to see his face, only a last-minute identity as a respectable young chemist and "the last suspect anyone would have", and given he was indeed able to reverse death and decay, seemingly permanently, it would have been extremely easy for the series to continue, and for The Grey Claw to come back again and again as many times as it took.
He is humorous and childish and absurd and even quite likeable, but the bodies do not stop piling near him, and the more he shows up, the weirder and bloodier things get, until what began as a bog-standard police whodunit ends with a violent struggle between a former professor turned bloodied giant ape man and a titanic lumbering murder robot deep within an underground dungeon system, where said murder robot proceeds to slaughter everything in sight including the Dr Frankenstein-gangster-pirate who created him, as the police throws dynamite at them because nothing else has worked so far in stopping them.
By all means, The Grey Claw had everything necessary and then some to make it into the biggest leagues of supervillain history, on the strength not just of his initial outing but his inspired characterization and great success and popularity by his time. Today he's remembered only among diehard afictionados and collectors, for spearheading many firsts within Brazilian comics and being one of the very, very few figures among Brazilian superheroes/supervillains to achieve any kind of fame at all. The scene and history when it comes to Brazilian superheroes, and reasons for the lack thereof, is a topic for another day.
Some fans have tried boosting the character's rep by claiming he was an influence on several marginally better-known characters such as Marvel's Blazing Skull or the nascent villain protagonist genre of comics that would pop up throughout Europe in the 50s-60s, but even I'll say that's a stretch too far. Records show The Grey Claw was popular in his time and region for sure, popular enough to be reprinted without credit across the globe and popular enough to be remembered and redrawn in present day (can't discount the strength of a good design, at least), but he was an anomaly at the end, a missing link untethered and unprotected from time.
A gothic horror alchemist who skulks around medieval dungeons, weaponizing every latest technological advancement and social anxiety to his advantage and even some that didn't really exist yet. A totem of death obsessed with life, the first comic book villain to surpass death if only for a moment, an inhuman murderous monster who turns out to be as painfully human as it gets. A skull-faced harbinger of death who foregoes the cloak and scythe to don a panama hat and fancy apparell and The Chest Logo Of His Persona and Brand. Just one year before some gringo strongman was doing that but with circus colors and a letter instead.
Pfah, fashion visionaries never get their due in time. But if conquering death was a trivial task for The Fascinora, conquering time and returning to his true self should be achievable in no time at all!
Ah Ah Ah!...
Give or take some 90 years, maybe.
(Art by @necronauta)
