Silver Spider/Spiderman

    Why present characters that never had their own book, or at least a cover appearance, in the Good Guys and Gals? It is very simple: these are the rarest of comic book characters, the ones who never made it into the public eye for one reason or another. There are some great stories behind these never seen characters, and this is one such story.

    Sometime in the early to mid 1950's, Al Harvey, of Harvey dynasty fame,(Family Comic House, Harvey Inc. etc.),went to Joe Simon, an old friend of Al's, and asked for Joe to create a new super hero concept for him. Al and Joe were good friends for many years, and Al trusted the prolific Joe Simon to create an "original" hero to re-launch Harvey into the super hero realm once again.

    So Simon had C.C. Beck (of Captain Marvel fame) take a concept drawing that Joe had done and flesh out a proposal for Al Harvey. Why Al Harvey never launched this new character is subject to debate and many factors. It may be that market concerns just wouldn't support a super hero at this time. Marvel (Timely/Atlas at this juncture) and a few smaller publishers had met with dismal results with the super hero genre between the 1954-'55 time period. For whatever reason, this character that Joe Simon had created, SPIDERMAN, which Simon renamed the SILVER SPIDER, for Simon thought that there were too many characters that were called "BLANK" man. But by any name, the character never saw light of day at Harvey.

    Fast forward to the late 1950's now and you have publisher John Goldwater (of Archie Company fame),asking Simon (along with Jack Kirby) to create a new patriotic character, or revamp their existing one, the Shield. The result was "The Double Life of Private Strong", AKA the Shield. In the process, Goldwater must have been very pleased, for he asked Joe Simon to come up with an all-new character. The Story goes that Simon took the old Charlie Beck pages and gave them to Jack Kirby along with the bio concept and Kirby turned this character into the FLY, on a suggestion by Simon to do an insect type character as the movie the Fly was big at the time. Also supposedly suggested by Simon, was the magic ring and Tommy Troy as a boy to man hero concept, although this idea is as old as Captain Marvel (which Jack Kirby had worked on, early in his career!).The Fly had a strong resemblance to another unpublished Kirby drawing of his character Nightfighter and had none of the elements of Simon's Spiderman/Silver Spider character. But in the first issue of the FLY, we meet Spider Spry, a villain and foe of the Fly, who looks almost identical to the Silver Spider character. It is well known that Kirby was not one to waste a concept or a drawing.

    Simon and Kirby only did the first few issues of the Fly before they moved on, abandoning the character altogether to other writers and artists. Kirby by this time was working for Marvel again and one day Stan Lee came to Kirby for the most hideous concept he could for a teenage super hero (on a dare from publisher Martin Goodman, Stan's uncle). Kirby fell back upon the old Silver Spider/ Spiderman concept drawings that he still had in his possession, and redrawing them slightly to where it now looked like a cross between Captain America and Ant-Man. But Stan Lee wasn't happy with the whole thing, as the character didn't look enough like a teenager for Lee. So Lee turned it over to Steve Ditko. Ditko on hearing of the concept of a boy with a magic ring said that it sounded like Simon and Kirby's character the Fly that they did over at Archie. So Steve Ditko takes the drawing and turns it into the now famous version of Spider-Man (the hyphen was added by Lee, who might have done this to avoid trouble and distinguish it from Simon's version).

    So this is the story behind the creation of these interrelated characters. Of note, Al Harvey would later ask Joe Simon again for another character in the mid 1960's, and this time Joe came up with the character B-Man (or Bee Man) who was a character that obtains his abilities from being bitten by alien bees. Sound familiar? Plus the B-Man's costume has also elements of Kirby's Nightfighter character and Simon and Kirby's Fly.

    All information contained herein is taken from articles and interviews dealing with, or by the creators and persons involved in the "creative process" itself. This being, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko, and we're sure that there is more to this story than presented here. We felt that it was of sufficient interest to present this partial information for your purview. We hoped you found this fun and as fascinating as we have in discovering the story behind these never seen characters.

    To see the "original" Joe Simon concept drawings, just go to Simon Entertainment's website, or buy AC Comics "Men of Mystery" issues by Bill Black, that features a Joe Simon interview in those books. On the back of those books (or on the website),and you will see the colored versions of these long lost characters.