Comments on: The Spider Returns! Villains, Pray for Your Deaths!

By: Black Gate » Blog Archive » The Spider vs. The Empire State

Black Gate » Blog Archive » The Spider vs. The Empire State — Tue, 04 May 2010 06:42:51 +0000

[...] paperback of the adventures of The Spider, the bloodiest of all 1930s pulp heroes. My reviews of The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham and The Spider: City of Doom, both published by Baen, contain plenty of background about the [...]

By: Look out! Here comes The Spider, man! « Under An Outlaw Moon

Look out! Here comes The Spider, man! « Under An Outlaw Moon — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:25:47 +0000

[...] Part 1: The Spider Returns! Villains, Pray for Your Deaths! [...]

By: bluetyson

bluetyson — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 12:50:43 +0000

You don’t have to wait to check it out, you can see here :-

http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/P04-TheSpiderCD/TheSpiderCD/The%20Spider-Robot%20Titans%20of%20Gotham/index.htm

By: Bill Ward

Bill Ward — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:45:20 +0000

Wow, these sound completely bonkers — I’ll have to check them out sometime!

By: John Hocking

John Hocking — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:33:13 +0000

Yesterday’s Faces is (IMHO, of course) the finest collection of pulp scholarship ever assembled. Sampson fuses sharp literary observation with with a deep, sentimental affection for the series characters of the early pulps. One of the principal attractions of Yesterday’s Faces is that the author deals primarily with tales from the teens and twenties, so many of the characters he delves into are unfamiliar to all but the most devout pulp enthusiasts.
Glad to hear these books are still available.

By: James Enge

James Enge — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:32:58 +0000

The Popular Press lives on as an imprint of University of Wisconsin Press. I see that Robert Sampson’s series about the pulps “Yesterday’s Faces” is still in print, and apparently there’s some mention of the Spider in volume 3 From the Dark Side. Might be worth checking out.

By: Ryan Harvey

Ryan Harvey — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:57:59 +0000

Yeah, “right frame of mind” is correct, Chris. Trying to read these consecutively hurt my head. I think that Page sometimes exceeded the lurid covers because the cover artist (and even Jim Steranko on this volume) toned-down the appearance of the Spider himself, taking away the fangs and gray fright-wig and making him look like the Phantom Detective. There was a brief run where the covers did imitate the character’s prose appearance, but it seems that on this one point, Popular Publications wanted to back away from gruesomeness.

By: John Hocking

John Hocking — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:45:04 +0000

Yeah, the Spider is sort of the hardcore pulp fan’s favorite pulp. Although I really have to be in the right frame of mind for one of these tales, nothing really compares to the outrageous chain of over-the-top action set pieces (hey, you didn’t mention anything about the robot duel on the bottom of the nighted East River in Satan’s Murder Machines…), the unparalelled emotionalism, and the show-stopping modus operandi of each gaudy villian. The covers of the original pulps were often as lurid as those of the weird-menace magazines, with cowled, sneering fiends menacing innocents with bizarre weapons while a terror-stricken mob flees and cityscapes burn in the background. Yet this is one of the few cases where the prose inside the magazine actually attained the level of purple frenzy promised by the cover.

Robert Sampson, ever eloquent and much missed, wrote SPIDER for Bowling Green’s Popular Press back in 1987. That’s the definitive examination of the character as far as I’m concerned. Tough to dig up a copy these days, alas.