YMMV / The Spider

• Complete Monster: Although many of Richard Wentworth's adversaries in the Dynamite Comics revival written by David Liss lack anything resembling redeeming characteristics, many of them go above and beyond:
  • Anput is an Egyptian terrorist who attacks New York City to strike terror among the populace. Stealing a toxin from Wentworth Industries and reformatting it into a gas capable of turning people into zombies, Anput starts indiscriminately bombing populated areas with the gas, converting many people—children included—into mindless, shambling zombies that tear apart anything they come across. Anput tops herself by gassing Citi Field and reducing tens of thousands to the undead, and later attacks Richard's friend and love interest Nita for the sole purpose of hurting him. Although Anput espouses that she's out to purify the city of wrongdoers like the Spider himself, any and all pretense of good intentions quickly evaporates when Anput's true goal is revealed to be to gas Wall Street and make a solid profit out of the fallout, uncaring about the thousands she's poisoned as a mere distraction and the gigantic blow to the economy she plans on causing so long as she can get rich from it.
  • Lazarus is a particularly depraved small-time criminal and one-shot rogue of the Spider with an especially disturbed MO. An unassuming, chubby man who lives in a small, underground apartment by day, Lazarus indulges in his compulsions by regularly purchasing tetrodotoxin and using it to poison the elderly multiple times a week, resulting in them being paralyzed and Buried Alive— whereupon Lazarus masturbates to their screams to be let out. Once he's cut off from his selection of usual victims, Lazarus poisons the police commissioner in vengeful frustration and decides to start targeting younger women to bury alive in his own apartment, noting with a special glee that his first victim has a husband and family and treating the whole affair as nothing more than a casual hobby of his.
  • The Lawgiver, real name Joe Hilt, is a self-righteous Knight Templar and a disillusioned former cop who decides to start murdering New York's law enforcement for a chance to spite the Spider. Teaming up with the Fly, a villainous anarchist, the Lawgiver slaughters many of the city's cops before eventually resorting to collapsing a six-story building to murder a bar full of officers--and over 100 innocent civilians with him. The Lawgiver's master stroke is to kidnap the police commissioner, Kirkpatrick, before bombing the ensuing meet held by the city's police department and government to take out both the law enforcement and governance in one fell swing, planning to hand off New York to the Fly to turn it into a cesspool of chaos and rampant crime. The Lawgiver is a narcissist driven by spite, anger, and a craving to hurt Richard Wentworth, and proves to be little more than a pathetic, groveling snake once the cards are turned against him. Even in a world of terrorists, murderers, and more, the contemptuous nobody of a detective still manages to become one of the most evil people to ever combat the Spider.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: For the Columbia movie serials adapting the Spider for the big screen, the character was given an outfit resembling more of a superhero - a spider web pattern design resembling that of a certain webslinger debuting in the 1960s. Stan Lee later openly admitted the Spider was one of the inspirations for Spider Man.
  • Even better, the villain of the serial was called "the Octopus".
• Iron Woobie: Through the series The Spider gets riddled with bullets, paralyzed, blinded, drugged, infected with rabies, framed, betrayed, disgraced, and comatose while fascists take over. All of this has an emotional effect on him, but he carries on.