Born to Russian aristocrats and raised in Volgograd and St. Petersburg, Sergei Kravinoff grows up with his half-brother and Sergei’s father’s illegitimate son, Dmitri Smerdyakov. Dmitri lives with the family as a servant with his mother, Sonya, unaware of his true parentage. Beaten by his alcoholic father, Sergei in turn torments Dmitri. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kravinoffs are forced to immigrate in disgrace to the United Kingdom and later the United States. When Sergei’s father dies, his mother is remanded to an insane asylum where she ultimately commits suicide, while Sergei becomes haunted by images of the squalid, spider-infested asylum.

Orphaned, Sergei learns to survive by his wits and cunning. He starts to travel extensively, usually as a stowaway aboard cargo ships or trains, and lives one time or another in every major city in Europe and Asia by his late adolescence.

Kraven possesses superhuman abilities conferred upon him via special herbal potions he periodically ingests. These abilities include enhanced strength (optimally lifting 2 tons), speed (able to sprint short distances at 60 mph), agility, stamina, and longevity. He can perform a standing broad jump of 20 feet. He can exert at peak levels for a half-hour before fatigue impaired performance. Despite his advanced years, Kraven maintains the physical age of a 30-year-old.

He employs a wide range of weapons including blowguns and darts, bolos, axes, spears, whips, gas bombs and traps/restraints including magnetic manacles and nets. He had wielded a leopard claw glove, a “jungle scent” spray to numb Spider-Man’s spider-sense, and a horn to drive animals into a rampage. Though he shuns bows or firing bullets, he has used a rifle to deliver a wide range of drug-tipped darts.

With the power of the jungle herbs, Sergei and Dmitri, AKA Chameleon, retained their youth through the decades. When Peter Parker first became Spider-Man, his early foes included Dmitri, now the identity-thief “the Chameleon.” Dmitri enticed Kraven to America to hunt Spider-Man. Kraven believed this hunt brought him and his family’s name honor, honestly gained, returning a measure of lost pride. He arrived with fanfare, rigging animal cages to break to make a public spectacle of his might as he subdued the wild beasts before the press.

In his first encounter with Spider-Man, Kraven was awed by his adversary’s power. Feeling both fear and rage, he saw Spider-Man as a monster, the personification of his family’s disgrace. Though Sergei continued to abuse Dmitri, the two partnered against their common enemy. Despite the trickery of the Chameleon posing as a second Kraven, Spider-Man defeated both foes, whereupon they were deported from the U.S. to Europe.