We’re moving into our last seven days of Jack Kirby Tribute Month 2025, dedicated to the Fantastic Four and related characters. Today’s prompt is Klaw, “the Murderous Master of Sound.”
Klaw’s origin is very much entangled with the Wakandans and Black Panther. We learn via flashback in FF #53 that Klaw was a scientist who, in a ruthless pursuit of his research into the field of sound, decided he had to have access to the Vibranium owned by the Wakandans. When T’Challa’s father King T’Chaka denies Klaw access, Klaw unceremoniously shoots him dead on the spot! Later, Klaw thinks he’ll shoot the young T’Challa, but he underestimates the boy, losing his right hand as a result.
In FF #53’s present day, Klaw is creating monsters of “solid sound,” using a convertor of his own invention. Losing once again to T’Challa and the Wakandans, Klaw’s hidden lab mostly destroyed, he makes one last desperate gamble, jumping into his convertor himself. We don’t see the result of this experiment until #56, when he’s revealed to have been transformed into a being made of solid sound.
There’s a neat thing they do in these issues with the sound creatures, where all of them are colored bright red to visually call them out. And when Klaw transforms, he too comes out red. His visual for the most part is a lot simpler than many other Kirby designs at the time, though the face is unique.
If you wanna see who’s next, feel free to come back by again tomorrow!
Klaw was not for the light-hearted. He is one villain I have spent some time thinking about what drove him to the dark side. There are of course a range of factors, but what was the tipping point? What got the teeter to totter?
A lot of red in today’s villain “pin up.” And amazingly enough, the reds absorb the heat and lead most others into story and the casual reader with nearly frozen hearts. As we have moved forward in time and electronics have shrunken, I have to wonder what his sonic weapon might look like now in terms of size. Thank you.
I don’t know what subsequent retcons there might have been, but when we meet Klaw in the FF, he’s clearly not a good guy. He’s all about blindly pursuing his quest for the science of sound, and he makes it clear that no one better get in his way!
As to the weapon size: it’s hard to say. Jack was of the era when bigger = better. For a computer (in the sci fi of the time) to be impressive, it had to take up a whole room, or a building. Interestingly, one of the few things that sci fi didn’t seem to predict was personal computers.
Still, when Jack needed his tech in a story to be small, he’d do it. The Mother Boxes were relatively small. As were a lot of the gimmicks that Mr. Miracle would use in his escapes.