Lead novel writers The first novel introduced Richard Wentworth, a rich New Yorker, the
secret identity of
the Spider, a crime-fighter. Smith's love interest was his secretary, Bernice; Kirkpatrick was a friend of Wentworth's, but pursued the Spider for murder, unaware of Wentworth's double life. As a result Wentworth frequently found himself battling the police, but he rarely returned their fire—"only to make them jump", in the words of pulp historian Robert Sampson. The two novels by Scott that launched the series established many plots and ideas that would reappear over the next ten years. The Spider, in the same mold as
ruthless heroes such as The Shadow, was unafraid to kill the criminals he fought, and he would mark their bodies with an inked red spider. The Spider's secret identity was repeatedly discovered by the criminals, although the police were never able to learn it. Van Sloan was frequently caught by the villains, forcing Wentworth into danger; in some novels she fell into the criminals' hands several times. Wentworth's skill at disguise was presented as being extraordinary: he could alter his appearance at will and never be detected. All of these devices were used repeatedly by Scott's successors in the later novels. Page's lead novels were dramatically more violent than Scott's. In Scott's first two novels, the Spider had been "a
gentleman crook battling normal crooks", in Weinberg's words, but Page introduced villains that threatened millions of people, and plots that relied on science-fictional gadgets such as a metal-eating virus or giant robots. Bittner had experience writing for Popular's
Terror Tales and
Horror Stories, and his background in horror fiction was apparent in his plots for
The Spider. This was part of a trend in the pulp industry away from pure action and towards better characterization and realism.
Internal inconsistencies The first issue included a short fictional biographical sketch of the Spider (probably written by Terrill), titled "The Web". The biographical details given in "The Web" were at odds with some of the details in Scott's novels.
Short stories and non-fiction features The Spider ran
short stories in each issue, alongside the lead novel. The first issue included "Baited Death", by
Leslie T. White, and "Murder Undercover", by Norvell Page. The stories that appeared in the magazine were detective fiction, often including horror elements. Occasionally, story elements appeared to be supernatural, but these were always explained away by the end of the story.
Arthur Leo Zagat's stories about Doc Turner, a crime-fighting New York pharmacist, often featured in the magazine, as did Tepperman's series about Ed Race, a juggler known as the Masked Marksman. A reader's club, the Spider League of Crime Prevention, was started; such clubs were a common
marketing tactic among pulp magazines, particularly the hero pulps. Those who joined the club, for 25 cents, received a signet ring of white metal with a red spider outlined in white on a black background. Popular Publications sold many thousands of these; Steeger commented that "Every kid in the country must have wore one at one time or another." Popular also sold a mechanical pencil with a concealed rubber stamp that would print an ink image of a spider. An example of the pencil sold in 2011 for $2,300, and one of the rings sold for $2,134.62 in 2019. A letter in the August 1941 issue reported that "Grant Stockbridge", the house name used since the third issue for the writer of the lead novel, had lost all his
Spider magazines in a fire. This was not a fabrication: Page had lost all his magazines in a fire at his house. The fire also destroyed a hat and cloak that he had sometimes worn at Popular's offices and elsewhere in imitation of the Spider.
Art The cover for the first issue was painted by
Walter Baumhofer.
John Newton Howitt took over with the second issue, and stayed as the
cover artist until late 1937. Howitt was a perfectionist, as Steeger later recalled: It was as though we were preparing something for the
Louvre. First there would be several hours of discussion about how the painting would be done and then John would bring it back for the most minute criticisms. I promise you, we covered every square inch of the cover and saw to it that it was done to perfection all the way through.
Rafael DeSoto painted the final 46 covers. Interior art was mostly contributed by J. Fleming Gould; these almost always included sketches of Wentworth and Van Sloan, as well as illustrations of action sequences from the novel. Small pictures of spiders were used to fill space. == Bibliographic details ==