The Spider's Syndicate of Crime

Before entering the comic industry Ted Cowan worked as a lab assistant at Shell-Mex then enlisted into the RAF as WWII broke out. Forced to re-enlist with the army after a crash, he became a dispatch rider, but another accident saw an end to his career in the services. After picking up a comic and being unimpressed by the writing inside, Cowan wrote to Stan Boddington, then editor of Champion. Boddington gave him a chance and Cowan started on Ginger Nutt - a successful strip about a young Australian boy, which ran for almost seven years. Cowan's next strip - The Jungle Robot - appeared in the first issue of Lion. Many adventures featuring Robot Archie were to follow. While working for Lion, Cowan scripted many popular strips including Paddy Payne, Adam Eterno and of course The Spider which he co-created and wrote the first two complete stories for.

In 1944 Reg Bunn survived a serious car accident which rendered him paralysed from the neck down, he recovered and went on to take part in the 1949 Amalgamated Press talent search which would gain him work for The Comet. He is renowned for his work on Lion, and his greatest creation is The Spider with writer Ted Cowan.

Jerry Siegel was born on October 17, 1914, in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of six children born to Lithuanian, Jewish immigrants. While attending Glenville High School he befriended Joe Shuster, as the two bonded over a shared interest in science fiction and movies. Unable to pay for college, Siegel had various day jobs while he also started to submit and sell comic scripts to National Allied Publications. Together with Shuster, he had developed a character called Superman, which they had intended on selling as a syndicated newspaper strip. However, after a few unsuccessful years, they finally sold the character to comic-book publisher, Detective Comics Inc. for $130.00. The comic became a huge success with Jerry Siegel on board as writer and Shuster on art duties. After military service during World War II, Siegel returned to DC Comics for a brief spell, but left in 1947 following a much publicised rights battle with the publisher over Superboy. He would return to DC Comics later in his career. Throughout his career, he co-created a number of key characters for DC, including Doctor Occult, The Spectre, Star-Spangled Kid and many of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Beyond DC, Siegel would team up one more time with Shuster to create the comic Funnyman, published by Magazine Enterprises. As well as scripting some Strange Tales scripts for Marvel and The Fly, The Mighty Crusaders and The Web for Archie Comics, he reached out to the Lion publishers, having received some copies of the comic and was so taken by The Spider, took over scripting duties from Ted Cowan.