Spider #73, October 1939

By 1939, Richard Wentworth had been operating as The Spider for nearly six harrowing years. He's been through everything a good, resourceful pulp hero could expect to face. Malevolent master villains. Sinister Asian world conquerors. Mad scientists more diabolical than anything conceived before that point. And of course since The Spider was a wanted criminal, endless police officials, uniformed cops, homicide detectives, and other officers of the law had been pursuing him with single-minded fervor.

The problem for his poor writer, Norvell W. Page, was that there are only so many plot variations for a hero who fought crime in his dual identities. So as the year 1939 dawned, Page's editors must put their heads together and asked themselves: What can we do that we've never done before?

Evidently, they decided to subject Dick Wentworth; his fiancée, Nita van Sloan; and the other stalwart Spider crew to a monthly series of challenges designed to make audiences clutch at their hearts and rend their garments in sympathetic anguish.

The stirring sequence began with Rule of the Monster Men, and ran for half a years - no doubt the worst of Richard Wentworth's harried and hectic career.

The Spider and the Eyeless Legion is the final part of this multi-story sequence of Spider novels in which first Nita van Sloan was reduced to a helpless cripple, and then Wentworth himself was forced to become a wanted fugitive. It is in that unaccustomed and dangerous role that this electrifying novel takes place.

This time, Wentworth must battle a new underworld power who is determined to conquer New York City, using the power of the Eyeless Terror as his sinister scepter. Forced to don new disguises and alternate identities. Then things take a terrible turn as the Spider is struck blind and enslaved by the malevolently fat Amoy.