The Spider #19 (April 1935), featuring the story, Slaves of the Crime Master, opens with such energy, with such breathless and exacting narration that being pulled into the world of The Spider is unavoidable.
"Never before has the Spider, Master of Men, crusader extraordinary against the Underworld, been faced with such overwhelming difficulties. A magically persuasive radio voice luring thousands of young people to crime; a scientific madman dealing germicidal death over the nation; every criminal gang in the country organized to levy toll by start terror…"
Notice the very specific and detailed accounts of the action: "luring thousands of young people to crime", not hundreds, but thousands. How about "a scientific madman dealing germicidal death over the nation?" Not a town, not a city, but the nation. And note the unseen terror of a "germicidal death."
In the world of the Spider nothing is ever done on a small scale. The villains can (and do) kill thousands. When The Spider (on the second page of the story above) encounters three henchmen guarding the place where the kids are meeting, he has to act fast to avoid capture because "The Spider has killed too many of them in the swift administration of his secret justice, to expect mercy now."
Yes, the Spider kills anyone who gets in the way of his obsessive battle against crime. He carries two pistols and plenty of back up ammo. The underworld knows to either kill him or run.
In the first nine pages of this story the Spider eludes the armed henchmen, gets chased by gangsters, invades the meeting attended by all those impressionable kids, while standing on the bar he pulls his automatic to shoot a beer bottle thrown at him, fights a couple of the kids, eludes a machine gun attack on that same meeting of kids, gets chased by the cops and somehow just never, ever stops. He is a whirlwind of thought and deed and drive and more than anything, The Spirit is one of the most exciting and memorable heroes of the Pulp era.
On August 18, 2011 Dynamite Entertainment announced that they had acquired the rights to The Spider. The pulp character, who first saw publication in 1933, is another in a long string of pulp-related acquisitions by the company. Some even consider The Spider, a violent hero who was shrouded in mystery, to have been a very important influence on the creation of Batman.
In a slightly ironic note, the day before, August 17, 2011, Dynamite also announced that they had been granted the rights to what may be the most classic pulp character of all, The Shadow. As it was at the beginning of their slightly shared history, The Spider was once again following The Shadow. In fact, as was the practice of publishers of the time, his creation was a direct result of the success of The Shadow.
While he may have followed The Shadow on the newsstands, he definitely was his own man. Where as other pulp heroes would shoot to wound, or do what they could to keep the action relatively clean, The Spider shot for the kill. His villains were just as extreme as he was. Even by the relatively lax standards of the day, The Spider was "out there."
Today The Spider is just as relevant, just as thrilling as the day he first appeared. He is attracting new fans every day and his profile is really rising among collectors as well as in the marketplace. In addition to Dynamite Entertainment’s new license, Radio Archives is starting a line of new live action dramas in an audio book format based on classic scripts from the Spider.
Tom Brown , the President of Radio Archives and noted pulp expert recently told CPG.COM that "The great pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s produced a number of heroes, but none as action-oriented as the Spider. For almost exactly a decade, from October 1933 to December 1943 the Spider was the scourge of the Underworld, doling out his own particular brand of justice and imprinting his dreaded red Spider seal on the foreheads of those he has killed for the good of mankind."
Brown continued by saying "One of the things that sets the Spider apart from other hero characters is magnitude; the villains commit acts of destruction on a grand scale, sinking whole ocean liners, toppling entire buildings, wiping out entire towns with germ warfare. The evil masterminds are in truth more terrorists than criminals, their villainy often more for its own sake than any concrete plan for profit." For a sample of what makes The Spider so exciting, scroll down to the end of this article and click on the link for the first chapter.
Too understand what made The Spider so great, it might make sense to take a quick look at The Shadow as well as the highly competitive nature of the pulp publishing world of New York in the late twenties and early thirties. This is a decade before the appearance of Action Comics #1 and Superman. Radio had just arrived and the nation was in a massive depression. Sound in movies was just coming into fact the marketplace. Comic books as we now know them were still at least five years away from making an impression on the newsstands.
Pulps, with their shoddy paper, their exploitative covers and their cheap price, ruled the day. Any reader looking for a regular fix of westerns, horror, thrills or adventure, had only one place to turn to, pulps.
The Shadow started as the narrator of Detective Story Hour, an anthology radio show which debuted in July of 1930. The show was designed to help promote Street and Smith’s magazine of the same name. The narrator was just devised in order to add some coherence to the often un-related stories.
While the stories were the usual fare of the day, it was the narrator, The Shadow, which caught on with the public. In less than a year, Street and Smith had fleshed out the character and in April, 1932, The Shadow as we know him today debuted in his own self-titled magazine.
Some historians maintain that the character of The Shadow actually debuted in the February 1929 issue of Fame and Fortune in the story The Shadow of Wall Street. While the magazine was also published by Street and Smith, there is no real connection between the Shadow of 1929 and the appearance of the narrator on the radio show.
The secret identities are very different and the over-all make up of the character is removed from the more familiar character that debuted in 1931. Still, it may have served as a jumping off point for the later version. It was not unusual for characters to be created by committee and than turned over to a specific writer.
The Shadow, as written by Walter Gibson, was a big hit. As a result of their sales, it inspired competitors to look for their own "Shadow."
Street and Smith had been around since 1855. They knew exactly what they were doing. So did on of their main competitors, Popular Publications. But compared to Street and Smith, Popular was a very modern and very deliberate creation. Unlike Street, they came into existence with one thing in mind, make money off of the pulp market. The exact same mind-set would govern a whole new generation of publishers a decade later when Superman blows everything off the stand.
Popular had been formed in 1930 by Henry Steeger. He handled the editorial aspect of the company and his silent partner Harold S. Goldsmith handled the money. From the beginning volume publishing, a complete coverage of newsstands if at all possible, was their goal. They started with four magazines and at their peak they were capable of publishing over forty titles a month.
While Street and Smith were creating characters by committee and than assigning them to writers, Steeger was looking for anything he could get his hands on from anyone who had something to publish. His experience had been as a story editor (mostly war titles) over at Dell. Over the years titles published by Popular would come and go.
Unlike many other fly by night publishers, Steeger was a strong editor, as a well as a very good writer himself. Popular published everything from horror to westerns and over to romance. He knew what was good and he knew how to get it on newsstands. Like any good editor of the day, he watched what everyone else was doing. Noticing how well Street and Smith was doing with The Shadow, Steeger develops the idea of The Spider.
Since he was editing so many magazines and still writing as well, Steeger turned the idea over to R.T.M.Scott. Scott had created a series called Secret Service Smith and had published several novels about the character. It may have helped that Scott’s son, Robert (R.T.M. Scott II), was also an assistant writer and editor for Steeger.
It wouldn't be hard to image that Scott had received a somewhat minimal template for The Spider from Steeger. Some historians maintain that the idea for "character development" was in Steeger's instruction to Scott. So the first two stories that Scott wrote for The Spider sound an awful lot like what he wrote for Secret Service Smith.
The most telling aspect of the overlap was the presence of The Spider's Hindu assistant, Ram Singh, a deadly expert with a knife. Secret Service Smith had a very similar assistant named Langar Doonah. In his first two appearances, Smith as a spy in the service of America, but for the next adventures he became a private detective who solved crimes. Scott developed The Spider’s secret identity as a millionaire playboy named Richard Wentworth. With time to kill, and a serious belief in civic duty, he would put on a long cape, a big hat and a face mask and go out and fight crime.
Scott also contributes another worthy not to the legend of The Spider. When his victims fall, he brands them with the sign of The Spider. Using a cigarette lighter designed to create the band, the concept is very close to the ring that The Phantom would use about four years later. In another interesting parallel to The Spider, the very first story line of The Phantom is about The Singh Brotherhood. Singh happens to be the last name of The Spider’s assistant. (I am not casting stones at Falk. He is one of the best story tellers and artists in comic history. At the time it was not uncommon for one character to influence the other, that’s all.)
But where Secret Agent Smith drifted off into the shadows and side alleys of pulp history, The Spider remains the third most popular pulp character ever published, right behind The Shadow and Doc Savage.
Why? Because after two stories Scott leaves Norvell Page takes over the assignment. He takes over the character and within an issue or two; The Spider appears to have been remade. Keeping the cape and hat, Norvell adds a fearsome mask with fangs. The Spider’s appearance is considered to be one of the most frightening in pulps. The editors may have thought so as well because the new mask, while it is always a part of the story, only shows up on seven covers. It is replaced artistically with the older, softer version as described by Scott.
Page elevates the Hindu assistant from a "servant-like" helper to a friend and equal. Wentworth's girlfriend, Nita Van Sloan, rises in prominence and starts assisting him while fighting crime. Oddly enough, Wentworth won’t marry her because he is afraid that if his secret identity is found someone will come after his family. As if the villains wouldn’t come after his girl-friend…
There are also a circle of supportive characters. His chauffeur is Ronald Jackson, who also served with Wentworth during WWI. There are also two characters that, in retrospect, seem to have obvious parallels to Batman.
The Spider is close to the Police Commissioner, Stanly Kirkpatrick. The commissioner is a staunch ally of The Spider and even thought he suspects that The Spider is Wentworth, he can never prove it. In addition to the commissioner, Wentworth also has a butler named Harold Jenkyns. There was also a scientific genius who assisted him with his career. Professor Brownlee invented an air-kill gun which allowed The Spider to kill silently when needed.
Another key change made by Page was that the device which creates the brand The Spider was no longer a cigarette lighter, but a ring. This was also invented by Professor Brownlee.
Wentworth becomes a great mimic (as does Nita) and his voice is so commanding that many are compelled to help him by just the sound of that voice. This leads to the often used subtitle, The Mater of Men.
There is also The Spider’s web, a long cord which not only helps him tie up criminals, but it also allows him to move around the city with speed.
But the biggest change is in personality. Wentworth goes from being a relatively nice guy with a hobby to an obsessive. He has to fight crime. It becomes part of him. As mentioned before the violence of The Spider is much more condemning than a regular pulp. The Spider shoots to kill and he doesn’t care. One of his justifications for the violence is that the villains he fights, even with the standards of the day, are nuts. The Eye of Death burned thousands to death. The Black Death sets the plague loose in New York City. The Spider even had a "Fu-Manchu" style villain, Ssu His Tze, the ruler of all vermin.
Page's tenure on The Spider was one of the most imaginative and thrilling in the history of the pulps. The man was gifted when it came to creating full characters and the incredible worlds they inhabited. His level of consistency on the Spider is on of the great runs of the pulp era. Few others could match his intensity.
I mean he had a villain bring The Plague to NYC. Can you imagine being an eleven year old and reading this? It is one of the most terrifying concepts possible. This wasn’t your run of the mill drug gang, it was The Plague. It could strike anyone, your mom, your dad, you!
While a few other writers did work on the character, it was only after Page had established such a strong run.
The character easily moved into two move serials. As movies do, they changed the costume of the character and added some elements that may have seemed out of place, or unfamiliar, to the pulp readers. Page assisted on the first.
The Spider lasted through an astounding 119 adventures. His stories have appeared in various reprints, even hardback editions. The character remains so popular that in 2009 Moonstone did an excellent anthology of new Spider short stories that featured the work of Chuck Dixon, Steve Englehart, Will Murray and an introduction by Denny O'Neil.
Dynamite has done an astounding job on The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, Zorro and Jungle Girl, to name a few. The addition of The Spider (and The Shadow) is another win-win for fans of comics as well as fans of the golden age of pulps everywhere.
Radio Archives has given us an exclusive 12 minute sample of the new Spider Audio book. Get ready for adventures! Click here and spend a few minutes listening to the new adaptation.