| "The Spider" stories are by far the very best of the pulp fiction high adventure story series compared to the other two, more well known magazines ('The Shadow' and 'Doc Savage'). Dick Wentworth, aka The Spider, is The True inspiration for 'Batman', except he has a girl friend/fiance and he settles most of his problems, permanently, with his twin 45s. Millionaire playboy, super-charged automobiles, secret rooms and hide-outs, master of disguise, fluent in French and Punjabi (to secretly communicate with his Islamic Sikh Warrior Servant, Ram Singh), a violin virtuoso who owns a Stradivarius; but also, unusual for the 1930s, he and his girl friend, Nita Van Sloan, vacation together and sometimes live together (when she is not being kidnapped, stripped and occasionally threatened with torture and rape), plus he also sometimes suffers from extreme depression.
And in these books, there aren't the occasional murders but wholesale slaughter with victims numbering in the hundreds, thousands and sometime tens of thousands - men, women and children, makes no difference...
When you think that most of these stories were written by one man - Norvel Page - and he wrote one book length Spider story per month plus numerous other short stories at the same time...
There were 118 total Spider magazines published, and I've read them all at least twice |
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