What better way to sell comic books than by emulating already best-selling titles from a competitor?
And that’s just what Atlas Comics did when it premiered Weird Suspense Featuring The Tarantula.
The name may be slightly different and even the storyline a departure but The Tarantula took advantage of the comic book community's love of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man.
After all, what is a Tarantula? A spider of course!
The story premise is that several hundreds of years ago a village is terrorized by a spider-tarantula witch/queen.
She and her giant tarantulas killed, devoured or transformed villagers into tarantulas. The local baron decides to take action and disguises himself as one of the spiders.
He follows the witch and discovers her whereabouts. Along with the villagers he captures her, kills her spider legion and burns her at the stake.
As she dies she places a curse on the baron: the curse of the tarantula. Both he and his descendants will transform into bloodthirsty tarantulas.
Modern day: a group of inmates escape from a nearby prison. They spot a lone house in the woods and decide to hide out there. Bad decision!
The house belongs to the currant Tarantula cursed baron. Upon their arrival he transforms into Tarantula and stalks them and eventually trapps them in his web and devours them.
The Tarantula was sort of a Punisher/Dracula/Spider-Man combination. It was a unique idea, but unfortunately didn’t fly and like the other Atlas titles ceased publication in less than a year.
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