In 1967, Fleetway featured the character in a number of digest-size original stories in their Stupendous Series of Super Library comics.
The strip had by now found popularity worldwide, including in Germany, India and Sweden, and it remained in print in these countries long after the character's final appearance in the UK.
This however failed to spawn any continuing series, not least because the editors of 2000AD subsequently realised that publishers Fleetway did not own the rights to the character, which were retained by IPC.
The series was complemented by an album collection, published by Titan Books, reprinting the Ken Bulmer/Jesus Blasco serials from Valiant.
Armed with his steel claw, which by now was equipped with a variety of weapons and tools in each finger, as well as with his power of invisibility, Louis Crandell battled various criminal geniuses, aliens, and the organisation known as F.E.A.R.
His claw had a number of inbuilt weapons, amongst them being able to fire missiles and gas along with a built-in radio transmitter and receiver.
After retiring from the Shadow Squad, Louis Crandell became a detective, and then a bounty hunter, before distrust of his past eventually led him to go to South America, where he continued to fight crime.
When The Steel Claw was reprinted by Quality Comics, a framing sequence featured Crandell (called Randell in this version) as an aging secret agent reflecting on his early criminal career.
In Paul Grist's comic, Jack Staff, a character called Ben Kulmer appears as The Claw.
In the novel Sherlock Holmes y los zombis de Camford ("Sherlock Holmes and the Camford Zombies", Ediciones Dolmen, 2010; ISBN 978-84-938143-4-2) by Spanish author Alberto López Aroca, Steel Claw (Louis Crandell) appears under the name "Lewis Crandle", and his career as an agent of the Shadow Squad (a branch of the Diogenes Club from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories in this version) is set back to the beginning of the 20th century (the novel takes place in 1903).
In Germany in the 1970s the magazine Vulcan was published under the title Kobra, which used most of IPC's adventure strips, including The Steel Claw, Mytek the Mighty, Kelly's Eye, The Spider, and Robot Archie.
[citation needed] For reasons unknown, the Steel Claw's alter ego was named "Bert Crandell" in Germany.
Steel Claw was published in Finland in the early 1970s, firstly in a series of digest-sized pocket books, and then as part of Sarjakuvalehti, which had three or four different stories each month.
In some comics, Mahesh is invisible except for his iron helmet, a direct influence from the Steel Claw series.
His abilities did not directly mimic that of Steel Claw and hence is considered the first original detective comic series in Malayalam for teenagers.
Steel Claw was published in Sweden under the name Stålhanden (Steel Hand) from 1969 onwards, in the magazines Swisch (1969-70 - 19 issues published, then absorbed in Serie-Nytt), Serie-Nytt (1970–74), reprints appeared in Seriemagasinet (1977–80), various very early stories thus far unreleased in Sweden are found in its spin-off SM Special (1979–85).
In former Yugoslavia The Steel Claw was first printed in 1967 by Croatian publishing house Plavi vjesnik in its Super strip biblioteka edition under the name Čelična pandža.
[3] Steel Claw was also very popular in the Slovene magazine Zvitorepec (1966-1973), with an estimated peak readership of 300,000 (with about 1.7 million people speaking the language in that time).