The Spider: The Savage Avenger of the Pulps

Now let's talk about my absolute favorite pulp here. At least when it comes to reading the original pulp novels. A guy meant to be a total Shadow rip-off and became his own thing.

If The Shadow was the dark godfather of pulp heroes, then The Spider was his blood-soaked, manic cousin. Created in the early 1930s as a direct attempt to cash in on The Shadow’s popularity, The Spider quickly mutated into something far more unhinged and distinctive. While The Shadow brooded in the darkness, The Spider reveled in it, his stories were packed with staggering body counts, gruesome villains, and relentless, often shocking violence that bordered on horror.

This is the story of how a “Shadow knockoff” became one of pulp fiction’s wildest, most enduring antiheroes, and why his legacy still crawls through pop culture nearly a century later.

Born in the Shadow’s Shadow

The year was 1933, and pulp magazines were booming. The Shadow Magazine, launched in 1931, had become a sensation, every issue flying off the stands. Publishers across New York wanted their own masked crimefighter to cash in on the craze. Street & Smith had The Shadow. Popular Publications had The Spider.

Editor Harry Steeger of Popular Publications wanted a rival who could stand toe-to-toe with the mysterious avenger of the night. He turned to writer R.T.M. Scott, who created The Spider, a wealthy criminologist named Richard Wentworth. By day, Wentworth was a suave man-about-town.

The Spider's costume changed. In the first couple of novels, he didn't even wear one. Wentworth fought crime in a suit, but left a spider mark on his victims. Then he added the slouch hat, cape and domino mask. Then he added a long shaggy-haired wig and fangs. Then, for some reason, a fake hunchback!

But something wasn’t quite right. Scott’s first two novels, The Spider Strikes! and Wheel of Death, were solid adventure tales, but they lacked the frenetic energy readers craved. So Steeger handed the series over to a different writer, and everything changed.

Enter Norvell Page: The Mad Genius Behind The Spider

When Norvell W. Page took over writing duties (under the house pseudonym Grant Stockbridge), The Spider exploded into pulp legend. Page was a journalist with a flair for the dramatic, and he injected the stories with a manic, apocalyptic intensity that no other pulp hero could match.

Under Page’s pen, The Spider’s world became a nightmare of blood, fire, and chaos. New York City was constantly under siege from madmen, plagues, and monstrous death machines. Whole neighborhoods burned. Thousands of innocents died. And through it all, The Spider raged against evil, often armed with twin .45 automatics, his cloak whipping in the smoke.

It was violent, yes, even by pulp standards. But readers loved it.

The series became known for its sheer velocity and emotional intensity. Page wrote like a man possessed, and in many ways, The Spider mirrored that madness: driven, unrelenting, and deeply human under the mask of terror.

The Spider vs. The Shadow: Kindred Spirits in Darkness

Comparisons between The Spider and The Shadow are inevitable, and fair. Both heroes were wealthy vigilantes who used disguises, secret identities, and networks of informants to wage war on crime. Both struck fear into the hearts of their enemies with eerie laughter and supernatural mystique.

But where The Shadow was calm, methodical, and almost ghostly in his menace, The

Spider was raw fury personified.

• The Shadow worked from the shadows — quiet, calculating, and deadly.

• The Spider was chaos incarnate — charging into battle with guns blazing, laughing maniacally as he left bodies in his wake.

The tone of their adventures reflected this difference. The Shadow’s stories were noir detective tales with a supernatural flavor. The Spider’s stories were pure pulp horror-action, often crossing into territory that today would be labeled “dark fantasy.”

In The Spider’s world, crime wasn’t just criminal, it was apocalyptic. Villains unleashed killer bats, biological weapons, and armies of death cultists. The entire city often teetered on the brink of annihilation.

It wasn’t just about solving a mystery or stopping a thief. It was about saving civilization itself, one bloody gunfight at a time.

The Spider on the Silver Screen

Given his popularity, it was inevitable that The Spider would make the leap from pulp pages to the silver screen.

The first movie serial, “The Spider’s Web” (1938), starred Warren Hull as Richard Wentworth and was a big success for Columbia Pictures. The 15-part serial featured masked villains, death traps, and cliffhangers galore, everything a pulp fan could want. It was followed by a second serial, “The Spider Returns” (1941), again with Hull in the lead.

Of course, Hollywood toned down the violence (there was no way to adapt Norvell Page’s body counts for general audiences), but the serials captured the essence of the character: a dark, mysterious avenger battling mad scientists and masked masterminds.

These serials helped solidify The Spider’s place in pop culture, even as pulp magazines began to wane in the 1940s.

The Violence That Shocked Even the Pulps

Even by the rough-and-tumble standards of the 1930s pulp scene, The Spider’s stories were shocking.

Entire populations were wiped out. Plagues turned people into monsters. Mechanical killers marched through New York. In “The City Destroyer”, a madman invents a way to disintegrate steal and uses it to level skyscraper and kill thousands upon thousands. In “The Pain Emperor”, victims were tortured in grotesque scientific experiments. In one story, a man obsessed with bats and wearing his own bat costume has a giant horde of venomous bats that he unleashes upon the city, again, killing hundreds upon hundreds before being stopped.

Norvell Page’s imagination knew no bounds, and his editors rarely reined him in.

But that was part of the appeal. The Spider didn’t just punish criminals, he slaughtered evil. He often left his victims marked with a bloody spider emblem, stamped onto their foreheads, a calling card that sent shivers down even readers’ spines.

In many ways, The Spider’s tales were proto-horror, merging crime fiction with gruesome imagery, psychological dread, and apocalyptic scale. He was less “detective” and more “avenging demon,” foreshadowing the dark antiheroes that would dominate comics and movies decades later.

From the Pulps to Pop Culture: The Spider’s Lasting Legacy

When the pulp era faded after World War II, The Spider faded with it. But his shadow (no pun intended) never entirely disappeared.

In the 1960s and 70s, reprints and paperback collections revived interest in the character. Comic adaptations followed, with publishers like Eclipse, Dynamite, and Moonstone giving The Spider new life in illustrated form. Each new version stayed true to the core idea, the relentless, borderline psychotic avenger who never stopped fighting, while updating the aesthetics for modern readers.

And his influence? Impossible to miss.

You can see The Spider’s DNA in countless modern heroes, especially Batman, who owes as much to The Spider as he does to The Shadow.

Both Bruce Wayne and Richard Wentworth are wealthy playboys haunted by guilt, living double lives as masked crusaders. Both use fear as a weapon. Both operate from hidden sanctuaries and rely on loyal allies. But while Batman embodies restraint and order, The Spider represents something wilder, the primal, blood-soaked vengeance lurking beneath the cowl.

And Stan Lee himself has said when he was trying to come up with a new hero for the last issue of his comic Amazing Fantasy, he remembered reading and seeing The Spider. Thus. Spider-Man was born.

It’s no coincidence that The Spider’s pulp covers, featuring him leaping through flames, guns drawn, or surrounded by screaming victims, still look like panels from a Batman nightmare.

The Spider as a Horror Icon

Revisiting The Spider today, what stands out is how close he comes to outright horror. His imagery, the black cloak, the eerie laugh, the grotesque spider fangs, all recall gothic villains and monsters.

His adventures read like horror movies disguised as detective yarns. Cities overrun by plague victims, cults of death, mad scientists creating armies of mutants, it’s the stuff of Lovecraft and Universal Monsters, filtered through a Tommy gun and a trench coat.

The Spider himself was no saint, either. He terrified criminals. He taunted them. He often seemed to delight in their fear. He was, in many ways, the monster that hunted monsters.

And that’s what makes The Spider endure. Beneath the pulp action and purple prose lies something primal, the fantasy of a relentless, unstoppable force punishing evil with a zeal that borders on madness. He’s part hero, part demon, and all pulp.

The Legacy Crawls On

Today, The Spider remains a cult favorite among pulp fans, historians, and horror aficionados alike. His stories have been reprinted in deluxe editions, adapted into comics, and discussed on countless blogs and podcasts. His imagery, the hat, the mad laughter, continues to resonate because it speaks to something timeless.

In an age when superheroes dominate our screens, it’s worth remembering that characters like The Spider paved the way, and they did it with grit, fury, and a splash of blood.

He wasn’t just fighting crime. He was fighting chaos, fear, and the darkness within himself.

And that’s why, nearly a century later, The Spider still crawls through the shadows of our imagination.

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