Spider Woman?!! But I thought Kars said we were done with hero stuff for a while! Annnnd indeed we are, as this is not a Marvel post, --but a creepy crawly Ace classic from the June 1953 issue of Hand of Fate #18. Artist Bill Molno densely packs every panel perfectly with loads of eerie atmosphere and lush line work, keeping the weird web motif spinning strongly in roof textures, foliage, fabrics, hair, fur --and fear! Artist George Roussos must have really loved that splash panel below, because a few months later he pulled quite a superb swiperoonie of it for the October 1953 cover of Out of the Shadows #10, just sayin'. Oh, and Happy Friday the 13th to each and every one of you today, too!
This is great fun and there is -- at least for me -- some sympathy for the spider woman who completely loses her human form forever before she's burnt to death. Sure, she was evil, but at the same time, driven by the need to survive. A good root for a monster story.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate at the end the real spider had 8 legs and 2 palps though it's missing it's body and is all abdomen. But close!
I love how her hair becomes kind of pseudo spider legs when she transforms. That's a cool image, so extra points to the artist.
Another reason I love these tales is, because, if it was meant or not, they are all about sex, and all pointed at the young boys reading this. Do not go to the home of the hot lady, because sex is actually getting your blood drained (yes, not how most spiders do it) by an evil, 6 legged monster. Stick with the nice, quiet, and subservient woman because a women that's all hot and wants sex is obviously a horrible spider demon.
It's not surprising every 1950s anti VD movie had this same plot, just with VD instead of a monster.
I like how the artist made sure the spider woman still retained her good girl figure, though I'm not sure where the cloak came from!
This is yet another example of a high adventure, mystery and supernatural horror story all rolled up into one. It is also another tale where an arrogant sceptic turns into a believer before becoming dinner for the supernatural.
ReplyDeleteI liked this one, story and art wise.
While no one has yet made a horror movie featuring a woman turning into a giant spider, The Blood Beast Terror of 1968 shows how it could be done. Although in the movie it features a woman turning into a killer moth that drinks blood, not a spider.
This one had me guessing in a few ways.
ReplyDeletePartly because of those crime fighter stories of the past week, I was kind of expecting the whole spider woman part to be a disguise for some down-to-earth criminal and set of crimes.
(Even if the "drained of blood" part clashes with that.)
Then I halfway expected Lucretia to be a red herring and the REAL spider woman to be defeated, with a happy ending for Joshua and Lucretia.
(Maybe even with Lucretia doing the heroics, since a lot of stories have the red herring character doing that.)
I can't really condemn this spider woman as evil. I mean maybe if she'd fracked irreplaceable virgin hardwoods or tainted an orphanage's drinking water, sure; but so far as we know she's just a predator. I don't think of lions as evil, even when they do eat somebody once a week. Now, if she was farming a basement of seasonally inseminated females to supply her dietary needs... well... that'd be much more like human than spider behavior, wouldn't it?
ReplyDeleteSo I have to say that, maybe suckered by her beauty--those shapely legs!--or her plight, and definitely because that professor was such a smirking pompous blowhard, I was pulling for the spider lady here. In my version, Hawkins would have been discovered a bloodless husk, and the temporarily fully-human Miss Tate would have claimed the spider woman had been scared off by the cops. How could anyone prove otherwise? But this ending, argh! After being rescued, by the very people he'd looked in the eye and called fools, from the very creature he'd recommended should be ashamed to believe in itself--laughing in everybody's faces the whole while--he's all "and now for my next act, I'll burn this priceless biological specimen to ashes and appropriate her career as a person who writes about these things." Some scientist. God what a jerk. I guess it really is atypical that he actually admits he was wrong all along. Usually these things end with the old "I'll never tell anybody because nobody would ever believe me" shtick. It'll be poetic justice is that last part comes true.
Love the art. Every panel with a spider net or leafy flame is my favorite. and I also love the way the spider woman's hair evokes her legs--and speaking of her wonderful hair, the mirroring of her and her blond victim in panel one of page three is just beautiful. I might have made that the splash. And speaking of the wonderful splash, I like the George Roussos cover version, too, but my favorite thing about the Molno piece is the way Miss Tate's arms circle around her victim's head, reflecting the shape of the web. Sadly that didn't make it into the swipe.
I like some of the descriptions of Joshua here, because many debunkers can be as aggravating as any believers can, regardless of which side you agree - many "Flat Earth" and "Moon Landing Hoax" debunkers are definitely bigger pests to me than the believers!
ReplyDeleteSo in a way, I feel like rooting against him too.
I absolutely adore the design for the spider woman. Rather than just paste a lady's face onto a spider's body or just go with a hot woman transforming entirely into a giant spider, we have a tall woman with the hairy upper torso of a woman along with four spider arms! The cape is such a fun touch too. Very very cool. I also love how the detective actually goes from initial disbelief to realizing that there definitely is some sort of spider woman on the rampage due to all the valid descriptions of her from civilians. I do love the unsung hero of this story, Mr. Griffin, the cobbler who attempts to go after the spider woman with his awl then, seeing that she's distracted by it, screams for help. Yeah, Miss Tate is gorgeous but she's not even trying to hide her true nature, greeting the Professor by telling him that he's just in time for dinner and reciting the opening line of the poem "The Spider and the Fly" (Or at the very least, something very similar to it. The actual line seems to be " Will you walk into my parlour?" said a spider to a fly. Still, the reference was not lost on me.) She's even wearing a similar colored dress to the one she wears as the spider woman. My favorite panel is the third one on page six when she's in mid-transformation. It's both sexy and fun!
ReplyDeleteInteresting though that she needed the weekly supply of human blood to retain her human form. Makes me wonder if she was even originally human to begin with.