The Spider Is The Master Of Men!

Martin Powell has been a favorite writer of mine since I chanced upon his magnificent Gaslight in Scarlet which pitted Sherlock Homes against Dracula. That gimmick has been done more than a few times, but never better than when Powell did it in combination with artist Seppo Makinen. So, I dived into this 2013 collection of Powell Spider stories titled Spider -Master of Men with anticipation. The results vary. There is no doubt that the Dan Brereton covers are a hit though. 

Powell teams with artist Pablo Marcos for the first Spider tale titled "Death Siege of the Frankenstein Legion" in which we discover that Nita Van Sloan has been kidnapped (a common occurrence) and the Spider leaps into the fray to find her. She has been taken by a strange scientist who has seemingly revived the dead and has several examples shambling around. This small nine-pager has a neat twist I never saw coming, but on reflection should have. 

In the second issue an artist named Hannibal King joins with Powell to give us the saga of the "Blood Reign of the Thunder King" in which all of NYC suffers under a deluge perpetrated by the titular villain. The flood waters rise and sharks literally swim in the streets as the Spider tries to end this weather menace. This story is in two parts and runs in total twenty-two pages. King's artwork is good, especially his rendering of Nita. I cannot find out where the second half of this story first appeared if anywhere. 

Artist Jay Piscopo steps in to draw Powell's story of the Spider's battle with a deadly ravenous shapeshifter in Return of the Monsters: Spider Vs. Werewolf. An old army ally appears who is hunting down the werewolf and thinks that Richard Wentworth might well be suffering from lycanthropy since he and Wentworth and other of their company ran across beasts of that kind in the war. This yarn runs twenty-eight pages, and we get Ram Singh and Jackson involved in the story as well. This one felt the most like a classic Spider story than any so far. Oddly the story was credited to "Martin Gram" inside, but it's Powell after all. 

"The City that Couldn't Sleep" is a prose story by Powell with illustrations by Pablo Marcos and follows a deadly menace which has everyone in NYC awake for weeks. The result is a near collapse of the social order. Only the Spider's special training allows him to keep functioning as he finds strange, hooded criminals robbing banks and whatnot in the chaos. Nita gets captured again, but as usual it doesn't do the villain named "The Dreamer" much good. I'm not sure where this first appeared if anywhere. 

"City of the Melting Dead" is a short story which originally appeared in the Moonstone anthology The Spider Chronicles. I'll have a little more on this story next week when I take a look at that entire collection. 

"City of the Bleeding Snow" closes out the collection with a comics story by Powell and artist Tom Floyd. and begins with Nita again captured by the enemy, this time called the "Snowman". His gimmick raining down deadly acids onto the population which causes them to melt down to the bones. This is a pretty gruesome 2007 Christmas story as the Spider goes to Nita's rescue and metes out his own brutal form of justice. 

These are grim and brutal stories by Powell much in keeping with wild and bloody tradition set down by Norvell Page himself. Page's niece writes a forward for the collection. I don't think any of these stories by Powell are on par with is Sherlock Holmes stories, but he sure ain't afraid to spill some blood. I do wish Moonstone had been more informative about the provenance of the stories in this collection. 

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