The Spider is an American pulp-magazine hero of the 1930s and 1940s. The character was created by publisher Harry Steeger and written by a variety of authors for 118 monthly issues of The Spider from 1933 to 1943. The Spider sold well during the 1930s, and copies are valued by modern pulp magazine collectors. Pulp magazine historian Ed Hulse has stated "Today, hero-pulp fans value The Spider more than any single-character magazine except for The Shadow and Doc Savage."
Creation and publication history
The Spider was created in 1933 by Harry Steeger at Popular Publications as direct competition to Street and Smith Publications' vigilante hero the Shadow. Steeger also sought to emulate the films of Douglas Fairbanks, while historians George E. Turner and Michael H. Price felt the character was also descended from Siegfried, Fantômas and The Bat.
Recognizing that imitating the Shadow created the potential for lawsuits as well as the potential for strong sales, Streeger consulted his lawyer, who advised him to hire a writer with an established character and have him transform that character into the Spider. Thus, R.T.M. Scott's detective character Aurelius Smith and Hindu assistant Langa Doone became, respectively, Richard Wentworth and Ram Singh. The Spider was published monthly and ran for 118 issues from 1933 to 1943. Sales declined in the late 1930s due to surging competition from superhero comics and (despite Spider novels making concessions to the popularity of superheroes, such as an increasing number of costumed villains) never fully recovered.
A 119th Spider novel manuscript (Slaughter Incorporated) had been completed but was not published until decades later (as Blue Steel), a heavily rewritten mass-market paperback with renamed characters. In 2012, Moonstone Books finally published it as Slaughter, Inc., in its original unedited form. The novel was again reprinted in 2018 by Altus Press as a facsimile edition, this time designed to look like a 1940s pulp.
Stories
The Spider stories often involve a bizarre menace to the country and a criminal conspiracy. They were often extremely violent, with the villains engaging in wanton slaughter of thousands as part of sometimes nationwide crime sprees. Pulp magazine historian Ed Hulse noted that "Spider novel death tolls routinely ran into the thousands".
Characters
The Spider
The Spider is millionaire playboy Richard Wentworth, who served as a major in World War I, and was living in New York City unaffected by the financial deprivations of the Great Depression. The ninth pulp represents him as the last surviving member of a rich family.
Wentworth is easily identified as the Spider by his enemies in a number of earlier novels and is arrested by the police, only to escape. He adopts a cover identity - Tito Caliepi - and associated aliases. The Spider's earliest costume consisted of a simple black domino mask, black hat, and cape. Later in the series, vampire-like makeup appears, which is replaced with a face mask featuring grizzled hair and finally a hunchback. These are added to terrorize the criminal underworld, while the Spider dispenses his brand of violent vigilante justice. Wentworth, according to the fifth story, is tall, and has grey eyes. He has an old battle scar on his head that flares up at times of great stress. He is an accomplished pianist and violinist, and drives a Lancia. He speaks fluent Hindustani and so talks with Ram Singh in his own language, with little fear anyone else would understand what is being said. As written by Page, Wentworth was also psychologically vulnerable and suffers frequent bouts of fear, self-doubt, despair and paranoia. Some enemies he encountered had names like the costumed super-villains of comic books, such as Judge Torture, Red Feather, The Bloody Serpent, The Brain, The Emperor of Vermin, The Red Mandarin, The Silencer, and The Wreck.
Movie serials
thumb|Colorized publicity still for the movie serial [[The Spider Returns (Columbia 1941).]]Columbia Pictures produced two Spider movie serials, both 15-chapter cliffhangers starring Warren Hull as Richard Wentworth. The first, The Spider's Web (1938), was also the first film serial to be made from a popular pulp magazine series character. In this serial The Spider battles The Octopus and his henchmen, who attempt to disrupt all commercial and passenger transportation systems, and later all U. S. industry. Spider pulp magazine novelist Norvell Page was one of the writers who worked on the serial's screenplay. Compared to other light-hearted action-adventure serials, Price and Turner felt The Spider series owed more to film noir, noting The Spider's Web had a "morbid desperation" that bucked censorship standards. They ranked it as one of the best Columbia serials, and one of the few to truly do justice to its source material, noting the fast pace and high body count. The Octopus would feature in a short-lived Page-written pulp series for Popular that was rapidly reworked as The Scorpion. Wildside Press published two The Spider reprints (#78 and 92).
Pulp Adventure Press (PAP) reprinted 12 Spider novels in a magazine-sized format, even including the original interior artwork from the pulps (#12, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 and 85). reissued the novels as a series of single pulp novel facsimile editions, as well as re-typeset stories in "pulp double novel" trade paperbacks. Both series use the original pulp magazine cover artwork for their books. Girasol published the first 23 issues of the original pulp series as "facsimile" editions. They also published 25 of their "double-novel format" issues, which total 50 novels reprinted in all (#1, 3, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 42, 43, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 64, 66, 70, 71, 72, 77, 82, 83, 86, 87, 91, 95, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112 and 114).
In 2007, New York science fiction publisher Baen Books published a trade paperback featuring three Spider novel reprints (#16, 74 and 85). In 2008, they released a second companion trade paperback featuring two more Spider reprints (#26 and 75) as well as a third bonus story about another pulp hero called "The Octopus". In 2009, Baen re-issued both volumes as mass market paperbacks. The Baen editions sported brand new Spider cover paintings by noted graphic designer and comics artist Jim Steranko.
Also in 2007, Moonstone Books published an original anthology of brand new Spider short story pastiches entitled The Spider Chronicles. In 2013, Moonstone published a second anthology, The Spider: Extreme Prejudice featuring 12 more brand new Spider short story pastiches.
In late 2009, Doubleday's Science Fiction Book Club reprinted (in hardcover) Baen's second Spider three-in-one volume from the previous year. This became the first Spider hardcover edition ever to be published.
In August 2009, Age of Aces reprinted The Spider's Black Police trilogy in a single volume which they titled "The Spider vs. The Empire State". This trilogy consisted of three 1938 issues that were connected plotwise: #60 (September 1938), #61 (October 1938) and #62 (November 1938).
In October 2012, Moonstone Books published an original Spider pastiche novel, Shadow of Evil, by C. J. Henderson.
In 2013, Sanctum Books reprinted 20 Spider novels in ten "double novel issues". Each book contained two reprinted novels. The pulps Sanctum reprinted were # 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 18, 30, 31, 68, 74, 78, 90, 92, 93, 96, 106, 111 and 118.
The Vintage Library has 34 licensed Spider novel reprints in the PDF format. For a small fee, each one can be downloaded from their website.
Facsimile Spider novels continue to appear in print from other publishers, especially Altus Press; they have also been issued in the Kindle e-book format.
Altus Press has begun reprinting the entire Spider series of novels in their original order of publication beginning with #1, on a monthly basis. Altus also launched (in August 2018) a "Wild Adventures of The Spider" pastiche novel series. The first pastiche was written by Will Murray. The Doom Legion has Richard Wentworth team up with James Christopher (a.k.a. "Operator No. 5") and "G-8", two of Popular Publications' top pulp heroes. Two pastiche sequels, Fury in Steel and Scourge of the Scorpion by Will Murray, both came out in 2021.
Comics and graphic novels
Eclipse Comics
In December 1990 American comic publisher Eclipse Comics announced plans to produce a comic book series based on the character. Writer and artist Timothy Truman based the three-issue limited series on the 1934 story "The Corpse Cargo", and the series was issued in the 'prestige' square-bound format popularised by DC Comics' The Dark Knight Returns; Enrique Alcatena contributed to the art. As noted in Comics Scene #19, Truman set his version of The Spider in the "1990s as seen by the 1930s". Elements of this version of the Spider's milieu include airships as common transportation, the survival of the League of Nations into the near past - Wentworth meets Ram Singh during an intervention into India and Pakistan - and World War II, if it ever happened, taking place differently. This series featured an African-American Commissioner Kirkpatrick. Truman chose to redesign the character, removing the hat and toning down the exaggerated monstrous look of Wentworth's crime-fighting guise. He had originally planned to have the character wrap his face in bandages before becoming aware of Sam Raimi's then-upcoming film Darkman. A long-time fan of the character, Truman had previous tried to get an adaptation made with First Comics early in his career.
Reviewing the title for Amazing Heroes, Fred Patten gave the first issue three stars out of five, bemoaning that the beloved character had been revised to "another grim vigilante". However in the same magazine T. M. Maple, who had not previously heard of the character, found it much more pleasing, though he felt it was weaker that Truman's best works. The series was a moderate sales success for Eclipse. and as a result they produced a three-issue follow-up The Spider: Reign of the Vampire King (based on "Death Reign of the Vampire King") the following year. However, Eclipse would go out of business before any further material could be produced.
Moonstone Books
Between 2009 and 2011, Moonstone Books published several comics based on the original pulp character, including crossovers with fellow pulp heroes Domino Lady and Operator No. 5
Dynamite Entertainment
In August 2011, Dynamite Entertainment announced an updated Spider comic book series, written by novelist David Liss; the first issue was released in May 2012. Award-winning artist Ron Lesser painted the first three issues (May-July). The Spider's costume in this series is based on the one worn by actor Warren Hull in Columbia's 1940s Spider movie serials, but the black costume's web lines are rendered in blood red instead of white. This comics series depicts The Spider and his allies fighting crime in a modern-day U. S. The 17-issue series received largely positive reviews.
In December 2012, Dynamite released the first issue of Masks, an eight-issue comic book miniseries that teams The Spider with Dynamite's other pulp hero-based comic book characters, including the Green Hornet and Kato, The Shadow, and a 1930s descendant of Zorro. Together, they fight a powerful criminal syndicate which secretly controls New York City through the corrupt and powerful Justice Party, which has seized complete control over the city. This miniseries, set in the Depression Era of the 1930s, was not in the same continuity as Dynamite's The Spider comic book series.
Influence
Notable fans of The Spider include Charles M. Schulz, who confessed that "I could hardly stand to live from one month to another when the new Spider novel would come out." Will Murray noted the similarity between the Spider's costume in the movie serials and the original Spider-Man costume, and the common element of both characters being perpetually sought by authorities unaware of their true identities.