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The Spider proves that although crime does not pay, it always provides a huge amount of white-knuckle fun! – comicreview.co.ukThis second volume of The Spider collects the action-packed fourth and fifth stories originally published in Britain's legendary Lion comic.He's the undisputed king of crime!The Spider is an amazing mastermind with a stunning array of weaponry and a vast network of villainous henchmen! Now the underworld is fighting back and have sent a strange assassin known as The Exterminator to lure the spider into a trap!But one battle isn't enough for this arachnid adventurer - when a shape shifting crook from another planet arrives on Earth, the Spider must stop the alien from plundering the planet and toppling him from power!

Over New York had swept the Master's dread Black Police-wiping out the last organized resistance to their ruthless Underworld rule of the Empire State! Only Richard Wentworth, his forces scattered, could hope to succeed where thousands had failed-and, attired in the Spider's somber garb, strike one last desperate blow at the master-murderer who had sacked a state to make a fortune out of dead men's bones!

A blood-red mailed fist crashed into the shadowy dens of New York's underworld, dangling the promise of vast loot for alliance, and a threat of stark horror for betrayal. The answer came swiftly in an orgy of killing and rapine-the Red Hand ruled all crimeland! Richard Wentworth, hastening to set the Spider's might against the new terror, was trapped in a murder net with Nita van Sloan, branded a policeman's slayer in the Red Hand's grip! Only the Spider could hope to win through this criminal army to the devil-brain behind that fist. And the Spider must battle alone, against time-and a foe who coldly put a price on wholesale, ruthless slaughter!

Down from the bleak Kentucky hills swept the stark-naked mob of murder-maddened Blancos-sacking and slaying as they came! Neither steel nor bullet could stem that terror-tide of man-made albino monsters, whipped to a frenzy of lust by their criminal chief. Eastward they crept until New York, itself, was at their mercy, and human victims, bloodied and outraged, lay in their path. Once again Richard Wentworth, in the Spider's disguise of doom, fought alone to wipe out crime's crowning horror and save mankind from death!

Like an eerie devil-dawn, that green death-ray spread its lethal shadow over New York-burning to smoking crisps the helpless hundreds who dared its path. For the Eye of Flame had loosed his fire-fiends upon America's proudest city, and, as prisons poured forth their criminals, and the underworld came into its terrible own, no man could hope to combat that ray of death. Single-handed, Richard Wentworth, in the Spider's gruesome garb, dared the Flame-fighting for an entire people's safety against a monster who had learned to make millions out of human misery and the charred cinders that had once been men!

Before the horrified eyes of the Senate's jammed galleries, that revered Senator died by his own hand. And Richard Wentworth, who had reached Washington in response to the newspaper agony column's personal, "In the name of democratic humanity, come to Washington before September 9..." knew that this marked only the beginning of a yogi-ridden dictator's reign. Behind that welter of machine guns and storm troops moved the Cobra, striking at the nation's very chief-and the Spider was face to face with the strangest battle ever fought by man!

Ruthless, invulnerable, that Scarred Hand reached out to destroy the entire law machine of New York-blasting into merciless oblivion those juries which dared convict even a single criminal. In that twilight of terror, when empty cells yawned for the felons who never arrived, and helpless Justice hid her bloodied head-no one but Richard Wentworth could combat this invisible Juggernaut which had paralyzed five mighty boroughs. Once more, in the Spider's weird vestments, Wentworth sets out-this time to annihilate a brain so evil that it is encased in two heads!

Looting, maiming, slaughtering, El Gaucho launched his colossal plot to unite the Underworld-to make himself King of America! No torture was too cruel for him to employ; no deed too bloody; no life too precious, except his own. Richard Wentworth-the Spider, who exacts justice when the Law fails-realized he alone could save America from wanton butchery, in spite of the grim reward posted for his head-its own weight in the purest gold!

Exactly at eleven-thirty each Thursday night the Death Fiddler conducted his unholy orchestra in a symphony of murder which sounded the doom of some marked victim. A master of the grotesque, he held an entire city in the strangle-hold of a helpless terror; even the forces of the Law stood in shuddery, superstitious fear of this new destroyer. And then the Spider, Master of Men, modern knight-errant of mankind, rose up against him! But the Spider, too, was baffled; not all Richard Wentworth's efforts seemed enough to destroy this new, this ugliest of all Hydra heads rearing out of the noxious slime of the Underworld...

Never before has the Spider, Master of Men, crusader extraordinary against the Underworld, been faced with such overwhelming difficulties. A magically persuasive radio voice luring thousands of young people to crime; a scientific madman dealing germicidal death over the nation; every criminal gang in the country organized to levy toll by stark terror... How can Richard Wentworth link these facts, weave a web of retribution for the Doom Dealer? With his beloved Nita captured and waiting for a ghastly old-world torture, his one-time friend Kirkpatrick ordering police on his trail to 'Kill at Sight!', his every movement hampered not only by outlaws but by the law itself-can even the Spider find a way to free humanity from the grip of wholesale destruction being planned for it by the greatest of all Crime Masters?

What manner of men were these who burned their victims alive-and in public! With flaming pyres adding their nightly terror to a city already tasting the grim pangs of slow starvation, the Spider, revealed at last, is forced to disappear! Can Richard Wentworth, unmasked and in hiding, successfully combat the Flame Men?

Richard Wentworth was playing the most dangerous game in the world-a man-hunter outside the law; a righteous lone-wolf avenger of the weak; a scourge of the evil, the wicked and the corrupt! Loathed by the organized armies of the underworld, hunted ruthlessly by the forces of the law, he was ever between two raking cross-fires... Seldom, however, had the Spider, Master of men, faced the odds which challenged him when the man called Aronk Dong summoned all the underworld to serve him in the most ghastly campaign of rampant crime and wholesale slaughter this country had ever experienced. Armed with a weapon which struck through stone walls at victims sleeping peacefully in their beds, it was small wonder that criminals everywhere hailed the new leader-and flocked in evil glee to his dark banner!

The madness first struck at sea! As if at a signal, young and old initiated the wild bacchanal of self-destruction! Never before had a criminal of such horrible, death-dealing genius preyed upon the American people. Never before did Richard Wentworth, who was in secret the dread Spider, combat a foeman of more deadly power. And while the Spider lay gravely wounded, his beloved, Nita went forth alone to battle for her sweetheart as only a brave woman can do!

In the heart of New York's Chinatown, on his imperial throne, guarded by swordsmen and gunmen and a labyrinth of death traps, sat the Arch-Criminal of all time. Master of life and death, of disease, of horrible, crawling things-the Emperor of Vermin released destruction over city and nation. The Spider, Master of Men, champion of humanity, fought with every ounce of his cunning, against the monster who personified evil incarnate-while one faithful servant gave his life in this, the Spider's most bitter, hopeless battle, and Nita herself was faced with a doom more ghastly than any criminal mind had conceived before!

By what strange twist of Fate did the fearful menace which was to shadow every man and woman in New York City first rear its venomous head in the distant Caribbean? When terror suddenly boarded a little tramp steamer and left crimson havoc littering its narrow decks a spluttering wireless flashed the doom of every living thing aboard. Within a week, the same ghastly fate struck a gigantic new ocean liner, its luxurious cabins occupied by the elite and powerful of a dozen different nations! Death-swift and terrible-rode the ocean lanes. And the Spider-taken for once off guard-was supposedly dying in a hospital room on the very day when that terror from the seas first showed itself in all its terror above the city skyline. How can the Spider, fighting death himself, help the nation he loves in her hour of greatest need?

When the Underworld united in one compact army of crime, the Spider-his prestige gone-faced the most vicious collection of criminals and degenerate killers ever assembled under one dark banner of bloody social war! How can Richard Wentworth, robbed of Kirkpatrick and Nita, renew the Spider-fear which alone can bring him victory from a menace that is making casualty columns of our daily papers and filling our institutions with driveling victims of the new madness?

How fight a menace which strikes without warning-which disintegrates flesh and blood and stone to mere chemical atoms! Men fled in blind panic from the merest rumor of a new attack, and even the Spider-dodging the death blasts-can find at first no weapon with which to combat this new and devastating evil which obliterates its victims in the fraction of time between two heart-beats!

Hideous maniacal laughter shattered the dark silence of ghostly tenements. Sleepy-eyed men and women, stumbling through the dim halls of the building, found a sight that chilled their souls with terror. On a blank wall, spikes driven through her, hands and feet, blood coursing down her arms and breasts in tiny rivulets, a beautiful young woman was hanging, crucified, dying. Still another victim of the Torture Trust! And while panic spreads, while hundreds die victims of the Killers, the Spider is blinded, his faithful servants imprisoned, his friends dishonored! How can Richard Wentworth, desperate and alone, combat the powerful, well-organized Murder Syndicate whose gun hirelings hunt him down like a vicious mad dog?

Thousands of busy persons bent over their desks in the tallest building in the world-conducting the commerce of the nation-when suddenly the steel girders began to creak and twist, and the gigantic edifice swayed giddily in the rising wind. Never before had criminal brains devised a more cunning or a more horrible weapon to garner their ill-gotten treasures. And never before was the Spider so strenuously put to test-for the Master, the man behind the devastation and death, eluded every suspicion, foresaw every contingency, left no tell-tale clues behind him as he ravaged, slayed and pillaged... Richard Wentworth, working for once hand in hand with the organized forces of law and order, fights the grimmest battle of his long career. Can the Spider avenge the countless dead who have already fallen? Can he bring the Murder Master to the justice he so richly deserves?

In a hundred thousand homes, families sat down together at the supper table. A few hours later, those persons were dead-killed by poison in canned foods! Thousands of women used cosmetics, and acid made their faces forever hideously scarred. A master criminal, daring and clever, was ruthlessly slaughtering Americans to win immense illicit profits for himself. Only one man was powerful enough and wise enough to stop this wholesale murder-Richard Wentworth, champion of oppressed humanity, better known as the Spider. And the Spider was engaged in the bitterest battle of his career, fighting the Avenger, a false, wily crusader who was determined to destroy him!

The Flaming Shadows fell upon the city, shrouding whole neighborhoods in a fiery gloom-wherein walked screaming death and merciless destruction... Go with the Spider as he battles, single-handedly, the Flaming Shadows-to save the very people who pray for his destruction!

Thundering far beneath Manhattan's thronging streets came the Death Express-a crack New York Central train bearing a gruesome cargo of lifeless men, women and children-their bodies stripped of valuables, naked and mutilated! A grim warning of the terror-reign that threatened America-at the hands of Twentieth Century land-pirates, whose weapon was neither gun nor sword, but the stunning, body-shivering force which lies in electricity! Can the Spider, using mortal weapons, fight the numbing power of the thunderbolt-and survive?

Fear stalked the corridors and offices on Capitol Hill, for it was from the ranks of the mighty-the rulers and lawmakers of America-that the Silver Assassins sought their victims! Singly, in pairs and in numbered groups they died, laying down their lives for their country-while panic spread, and the Spider, alone aware of the terrific catastrophe which impended, fought through black, bodiless shadows to reach and destroy the menace which festered underground!

Never before had any criminal dared give open challenge to the Spider! Never before had Richard Wentworth faced a foe who welcomed personal combat with the grim avenger whom all others feared... And while they fought-the Spider and the Fly-a new and fearless criminal army was forming; men and women were dying by the scores; and the youth of a nation was flocking to the dark banner of that gentlemanly killer whose battle cry was "Kill the Spider-and the world is ours!"

Never before in history had anything quite so horrible as the Mad Horde been loosed upon a terrified humanity! In rural towns and through the thronging streets of great cities the death-bringers stalked, spreading the slow madness of which they themselves must soon die! The Spider, dismayed and horrified as never before in his long career, is forced at last into risking the life of the girl he loves-so that a million others may live!

America faces certain doom as its citizens fall in screaming thousands before the noxious death vapors loosed upon them by the Green Hand. How can the Spider, harried and threatened by a hundred new and deadly perils, check the rising power of the next Dictator-and lay bare the scheming, criminal mind which seeks to enslave the nation?

Like the consuming flames of a prairie fire the dread news spread: "The Spider has gone mad! He will massacre us all!" But Richard Wentworth, never more sane, was even then gambling life itself in one desperate effort to save the city which cursed his name-from the awful ravages of man-spread plague!