Spencer Smythe

Spencer Smythe

Spencer Smythe and his Spider-Slayers
Publication information
Publisher Marvel Comics
First appearance The Amazing Spider-Man #25 (June 1965)
Created by Stan Lee
Steve Ditko
In-story information
Species Human
Abilities Robotics
Arachnid expert

Spencer Smythe is a fictional character, a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He is the father of Alistair Smythe.

Publication history

Spencer Smythe first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #25 (June 1965) and was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

Fictional character biography

Professor Spencer Smythe was a robotic and arachnid expert who asked J. Jonah Jameson to fund his projects, having become convinced by Jameson's editorials that Spider-Man was a menace. After watching a demonstration showing that Smythe's robot could sense and track spiders, Jameson hired Smythe to capture Spider-Man. Jameson himself controlled the robot, meaning that Spider-Man found himself chased by a machine with Jameson's face. However, Spider-Man escaped by leaving his Spider-Man suit wrapped in the robot's tentacles.[1]

Smythe, annoyed at the inability of his robot to capture Spider-Man, began to obsess about the Web-Crawler, turning to crime to finance his research and constantly improving his robots, which he dubbed Spider-Slayers.[2] However, no matter how deadly or powerful he made them they were always defeated by Spider-Man utilizing a key flaw in their designs; the second one, for example, was capable of tracking a unique energy signature generated by spiders, but was defeated when Spider-Man lured it back to Smythe's laboratory, causing it to overload from the multitude of spiders Smythe kept there for his research.[3]

Eventually, Smythe's criminal career came to an end when the radioactive materials used in the manufacture of the robots poisoned him, dooming him to a slow and agonizing death.[4] Blaming Jameson and Spider-Man equally for his impending demise, Smythe handcuffed the two of them together with a bomb scheduled to detonate in 24 hours, determined to make the two of them suffer the agony of inescapable death that he saw them as having condemned him to.[5] Unfortunately for Smythe, his disease was too advanced for him to survive the 24 hours himself, and he died convinced that he had killed off the two men responsible. Peter Parker, however, had a pretty good grasp of what made mechanical devices tick, and was able to abort the bomb by freezing its controls mere moments before it would have detonated.[6]

During the Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy storyline, Spencer Smythe is cloned by Miles Warren and his company New U Technologies.[7]

Other media

Television

Spencer Smythe as he appears on Spider-Man: The Animated Series.

Film

A viral marketing campaign for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 shows a mention of Spencer Smythe in a Daily Bugle article as the head of the engineering division of Oscorp and that he is working on significant advancements in robotics. An article published at a later date revealed that Spencer was fired from his position as department head and replaced by his son Alistair.[8][9]

Video games

References

  1. The Amazing Spider-Man #105
  2. The Amazing Spider-Man #106-107
  3. The Amazing Spider-Man #107
  4. The Amazing Spider-Man #186
  5. The Amazing Spider-Man #190
  6. The Amazing Spider-Man #192
  7. Clone Conspiracy #2
  8. Mercado, Joy (October 14, 2013). "Oscorp Biz Holds Steady". Tumblr. Retrieved October 22, 2013.
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