Titanic Tales Featuring The Spider!

Titanic Tales was not a title I jumped at when I first saw it. Back in 1998 when it dropped the near twenty-dollar price point was more painful than it is today for one thing. Also, I was only beginning to get deeply interested in pulp heroes aside from some comic appearances at Marvel and DC. But eventually I did pick it up and I'm so happy I did, because it is chock full of fantastic and delightfully nasty tales of all sorts. The catchphrase "Lurid Pulp Stories to Rot Your Brain!" is rather accurate. And there is no more lurid story in the collection than the one starring The Spider titled "Burning Lead for the Walking Dead" by Mark Wheatley. This is a full-on comic story in a tome which is predominantly prose. 

As you can see from this draft of the cover art, the original title was "Eat Flesh, Drink Blood, Break Heads!" That's accurate but I prefer the more poetic title they landed on. And if you look closely at the cover art above, you'll see the "Cannibal Queen" as she's called in the story is munching on part of a leg and not just brushing her hair back as the published cover shows. The story is fifty pages of straightforward action as Richard Wentworth, Nita Van Sloan, and Commissioner Kirkpatrick visit a swanky new eatery in the big city. They are invited inside this place which sports exotic decorations and taken to a private room to enjoy their meal. But soon the Spider makes his appearance and discovers the restaurant is actually designed to process and deliver human remains as fancy food for the elite. In the dark recesses of "The Pit" the Spider finds said elite reduced to slavering zombies hungry for live human meat. It's all he and his allies can do to elude the cannibals as well as two deadly white tigers the Cannibal Queen keeps as pets. Mark Wheatley's spry light artwork helps this heady brew go down, but it's not a story for the meek. 

I discovered this cover on the internet suggesting the story had been reprinted by Moonstone in the early 2000's in an expanded format. But I cannot find any evidence that this version was ever actually published, but only advertised. I certainly don't remember seeing it and I've been a bit of a Moonstone fan for some time. Whatever the case, the new cover art is dandy indeed. 

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