Tuesday, June 14, 2016

CLAWFANG, The Flintstones Barbarian!!

Look, you can have all of your barbarian sagas set in the misty dawns or pre-history. SNORE!!

No, I'll take...

Clawfang?!?! Who dat?

Buckle in, kids...

We're millions of years in the future!!








This just goes to prove the long-standing theory that the Flintstones is set millennia after the Jetsons, as the Spacely Sprockets/Cogswell Cogs wars led to an apocalypse that gave birth to primitive humans sharing the Earth with tame dinosaurs aping modern technology that true stone-agers could have had no knowledge of.

Anyway, this little 2 page preview appeared in Harvey's Thrill-O-Rama #2 (1966), and it was followed by a five-pager (which you can read here) in Unearthly Spectaculars #2. And that was it. There was no follow-up strip, and in a couple of months Harvey abandoned it's attempt to stray away from kiddie books. And Clawfang, barbarian of the future, was never heard from again.

It's too bad, because aside from the too on-the-nose name (Claw and Fang? You're overdoing it, creator Wally Wood!), a future barbarian is much more interesting than one set in the past. Newly evolved species, remnants of atomic technology making trouble, the possibility of those space colonists coming back...much more interesting than Crom and wizards and every other done-to-death barbarian cliche.

Come back Clawfang....

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