The Spider
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- This article is about the pulp magazine character. For the comic character, see Alias the Spider, and for other meanings, see Spider (disambiguation).
The Spider was the violent, relentless hero of a pulp magazine series produced by Popular Publications from 1933 to 1943.
Richard Wentworth, a wealthy socialite and amateur detective, led a double life as The Spider, a mysterious and fearsome vigilante who killed criminals and stamped their foreheads with the seal of a crimson spider he kept concealed in a special cigarette lighter.
Created by Harry Steeger as competition to Street and Smith Publications's The Shadow, and at first written by R.T.M. Scott, The Spider began as a mysterious, but uncostumed, avenger who operated after the fashion of a secret agent. Scott's Wentworth was aided by his fiance, Nita Van Sloan, his Hindu manservant Ram Singh, who was a deadly knife thrower, an inventor named Professor Brownlee, his old war colleague, Jackson, and his faithful butler, Jenkins.
While The Spider used such secretive weapons as a silent air pistol that could be broken down and concealed in a hollow shoe tree, and a sword cane, his weapons of choice were a set of blued steel .45 automatics.
Dogging Wentworth's steps was his friend and foil police commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick, who suspected Wentworth was The Spider, but could not prove it.
After two issues, the series was handed over to Norvell Page, who wrote under the house pen name Grant Stockbridge. Page's changes included making Ram Singh a burly, bombastic Sikh, and giving The Spider a 'public' persona: a disguise that made Wentworth look like a cloaked, slouch-hatted and hunchbacked 'monster' with a fright wig, hooked nose, bushy brows and fanged teeth. This disguise may have been copied from a 1921 Harold Lloyd film, "Dr Jack," though other sources say it may have been a blending of John Barrymore's Mr. Hyde and Lon Chaney's vampire from "London After Midnight." While this scuttling horror graced the ink sketches illustrating the inside of the magazine, it only graced a few of the covers. Most of the magazine's covers muted The Spider's look by depicting him in cloak, slouch hat and a black domino mask, akin to the mask of The Lone Ranger. In one of the early Page stories, before Wentworth created the 'vampiric' disguise, The Spider wore a full-face "curtain" mask with eyeholes. Unlike The Shadow, which focused on mystery, The Spider stories focused on frenetic action and desperation, with Wentworth battling to foil some of the most vile and sadistic villains in pulp history. Probably the most violent and action-packed of any of the major pulp series, The Spider perhaps retains more appeal to modern audiences than other, more dated pulp hero stores because of this.
There were two movie serials produced about The Spider:
- The Spider’s Web (1938)
- The Spider Returns (1941)
These were 15-chapter cliffhangers produced by Columbia Pictures, and starring Warren Hull as Richard Wentworth. The film depiction had The Spider wearing a web-patterned black cloak and full-head hood which nowadays looks closer to Spider-Man's costume rather than the pulp 'monster' image. These are not currently available on the home video market. They are available on the video collector market.
The Spider pulps have been reprinted in both paperback and magazine format, with mass-market paperback reprints appearing as recently as the 1990's. Small boutique publishers such as Girasol have been releasing facsimile editions of the original stories in limited runs up to the present time.
The characters were reinterpreted in comic book form by Tim Truman in the 1990s.
The Spider is a member of the Wold Newton family.
The Spider will make his return with a short story collection from Moonstone Books, a small independent publisher best known for their stories about Lee Falk's famous hero The Phantom.
