Who was The Spider?
In the early 1930’s, powerhouse pulp publishers Popular Publications began to lose sales to their main rivals, Street and Smith Publications.
While Popular Publications continued to produce such titles as Dime Detective, Dime Mysteries, and Ace-High Westerns, the public fell for the king of the radio detectives, the mysterious Shadow.
There was only one thing to do.
The Spider – Master of Men was first published by Popular Publications in the 1933. Similar in feel to Street and Smith’s The Shadow, the Spider was secretly Richard Wentworth, former military officer and World War I veteran.
To fight crime in New York City, Wentworth donned the familiar uniform of urban heroes: the dark cape and black hat.
The first two Spider adventures, The Spider Strikes! and The Wheel of Death, were written by Reginald Thomas Maitland Scott (RTM Scott) and while popular, were considered by Popular Publications to be slow-moving and pedantic.
In the third story, the writing chores were given to other writers under the pen name Grant Stockbridge. The writer providing most of the heavy lifting, Norvell W. Page, went on to pen over ninety Spider stories, as well as his own series of sci-fi and fantasy novels.
After RTM Scott left the series, the Spider became a more dynamic figure, donning disguise to hide his crime-fighting identity, masquerading as a gruesome, disfigured man or a vampiric monster. To gain information, he sometimes took the identity of Blinky McQuade, a small-time hood, to gain access to New York’s underworld.
His steadfast assistant and fiancée, Nina Van Sloan, shared Wentworth’s secret and also helped him in his investigations. On two occasions, Nina took over the role of the Spider while Wentworth healed from injuries.
Other allies in the Spider’s fight were Ram Singh, a Sikh manservant and expert knife thrower, Ronald Jackson, Wentworth’s chauffer who served under Wentworth during the war, and Harold Jenkyns, the Wentworth family butler.
Those who helped in the Spider’s struggle but were unaware of his secret were police chief Kirkpatrick and Professor Ezra Brownlee.
The Spider had a variety of colorful enemies, as was the custom of the day for any masked villain worth his salt. He regularly matched wits with the likes of the Fly, MUNRO, the Master of Disguise, the Living Pharaoh, the Brain, and the Emperor of Vermin. Ironically the Spider also faced the mysterious Bat Man.
His calling card was a dot of red ink that he left on the forehead of evil-doers, in the shape of a spider. He was wanted by the police, constantly hunted, but vowed never to harm those who sought, like himself, to protect others.
The Spider continued his run in pulps for over a hundred issues and appeared as a masked man in the movie serials The Spider’s Web and The Return of the Spider, the former written by L. Ron Hubbard. The mystery man also appeared in paperback reprints and currently has a home with Dynamite Entertainment in graphic novels.
