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"Pulp fiction is back with a vengeance!" screams the sell-sheet from Baen Books, the major SF publisher with Simon & Schuster distribution. And how! The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham, is the first mass market Pulp-hero reprint book since Bantam stopped publishing Doc Savage in the Nineties. And if that alone isn't enough to excite pulp fans, the Baen Spider volumes feature covers, frontspieces and design by Jim Steranko, comics legend and Pulpcon Guest of Honor, who has previously done covers for revivals of G8, The Shadow and Doc Savage (Marvel Comics). Baen has published two Spider collections, each in trade-paperback AND mass-market paperback format.
City of Doom Mass-market PB August 2009 Robot Titans Of Gotham TPB Published June 2007 The Spider at BookExpo America Interview with Chris Kalb @ Baen.com The Spider Ring 2007
The second (and final) book from Baen actually contains three Spider stories:
"The City Destroyer" (January 1935), "The Faceless One" (November 1939) and "The Council of Evil" (October 1940).
The trade paperback was published June 2008 and now a mass-market edition will be released August 2009.
This first book contains two Spider adventures -- "Satan's Murder Machines" (December 1939)
and the oft-reprinted "Death Reign of the Vampire King" (November 1935) -- plus for some inexplicable reason
a third "bonus" story which is attributed to Norvell Page:
"The City Condemned to Hell" from The Octopus single-issue pulp (February-March 1939).
A mass-market edition was published April 2008.
Robot Titans
1st draft
2nd draft
There was a flurry of promotion surrounding the release of Titans in 2007. Read more here:
Here is a report from THE publishing trade show in New York City, where many Spider Rings were
given out and we got to meet Baen Books' own Corinda Carford and Toni Weisskopf.
Baen regularly posts interviews with authors about their new releases.
Here, the creator of SpiderReturns.com fills in for Norvell Page.
Baen Books returned The Spider to mainstream bookshelves,
and the tradition of The Spider Ring returned to help promote it.