Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #487: Black Spider

This is entry #487.  I’ve been doing this series for a long time.  I have no plans to quit anytime soon.  That sometimes means I have a hard time picking out a character to spotlight, but then the darnedest thing happened:  I was for the first time surprised that a character I was considering hadn’t been covered yet.  Usually it’s the other way around.  Heck, I once wrote up a whole column before realizing it was for a character I had already covered.

Anyway, this is Black Spider, the anti-drug villain.

Black Spider is (usually) one Eric Needham.  First appearing in Detective Comics #463 in a story by writer Gerry Conway and artist Ernie Chua, Eric was a drug addict living in Gotham City.  He had a wife, Linda, and a young son named Michael, but he was really hooked on drugs.  He got so desperate one day that he started up performing petty crimes, even robbing a liquor store at one point.  But something went wrong during the robbery, and Eric accidentally killed the owner, who just happened to be his father.

Man, I should go look that story up.  Did Eric not know his father owned that liquor store or something before he robbed it?  I would think he would have had an idea of that, but Wikipedia’s biography doesn’t say.

Regardless, Eric was so angry that he took to blaming drugs for what happened.  He managed to beat his addiction and but his acrobatic skills to the test, getting a suit full of weapons and hitting the streets as the Black Spider, a killer who targeted drug dealers.

However, Eric eventually learns the funding for his suit comes from a drug kingpin named Hannibal Hardwicke, and Batman has to step in to make sure Eric doesn’t kill again.  From there, Black Spider would bounce in and out of prison (I’m guessing), and the story I know him best for was my personal first exposure to the guy, a 90s-era series, new at the time, Batman: Shadow of the Bat.  He got a spotlight in issue #5 after the four issue opening storyarc that introduced Mr. Zsasz to comics, and given the contents of Black Spider’s and Zsasz’s stories, I had the feeling Shadow of the Bat was going to be a more “edgy” sort of Batman series.  Then it went on to do rather run-of-the-mill for the time Batman stories, so not so much.  Anyway, the issue in question had Eric donning the Black Spider suit again after his wife and son were killed when drug dealers gave them both an overdose, with the little boy’s coming from his the stuff being laced into his breakfast cereal, prompting Eric to go on a suicide mission to avenge his family, dying in the process.  I remember that issue very distinctly because, well, what other comics series at the time was going to kill a child with a drug overdose with his breakfast cereal?

That would seem to be the end of Black Spider, but he then showed up without any explanation whatsoever for an issue or two of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman as a man dating Lyta Hall.  Since he was alive there, that would seem to mean that Black Spider was free to appear in other books, where he would become a pawn of Amanda Waller and the Suicide Squad or as a member of various supervillain gangs.  So, he’s one of the many background characters I have covered here.  Heck, there were even a couple other guys to use the name Black Spider, but I don’t much care about them right now.

Instead, I will take the time to point out his current deal, different from his old one, and a rather interesting appearance he made somewhere else.  In the current comic series The Penguin, Black Spider is recruited by Oswald Copplepot in the Penguin’s efforts to retake the Gotham City underworld after it was taken over by his two classless children.  This Black Spider is also anti-drug, but with a twist:  he’s a gay man whose lover Daniel is dying of a terminal illness and needs Bane’s Venom drug to keep the pain away.  As such, Eric works first for the Penguin’s kids and later as a spy for Penguin himself.

The other instance is in animation as a reoccurring minor villain in the Young Justice animated series.  That Black Spider is more of an evil version of Marvel’s Spider-Man, a noteworthy thing in and of itself since Young Justice creator Greg Weisman was also the man behind the short-lived but acclaimed animated series Spectacular Spider-Man so he not only put a Spider-Man like character into Young Justice, but he also hired voice actor Josh Keaton to play the character as Keaton had been his Peter Parker on Spectacular.

So, that’s Black Spider, a guy who really hates drug dealers, and not without some good reason.