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Characters : Professor Spencer Smythe

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Attributes

Eyes:

Blue

Features:

Usually accompanied by either a two-legged or eight-legged robot

Hair:

Alternates between gray and red

Height:

Unknown

Weight:

Unknown

Powers

Abilities:

Smythe is a reknown robotic expert and knows about everything there is to know when it comes to spiders.

Equipment:

Smythe designed a number of robots, which he termed "Spider-Slayers" after his initial defeat by Spider-Man. The early ones were bi- pedal, designed to be operated by remote control and like a spider, could walk straight up walls. The later ones were built to look more like a spider, and sometimes had cockpits so a controller could ride along.

Limitations:

Apparently skipped physics class the day they covered the dangers of handling radioactive energy sources.

Strength Level:

Normal human strength

Weapons:

None other than the robots.

Summary

Citizenship:

U.S.

Created By:

Stan Lee, Steve Ditko

Current Occupation:

Deceased

Dual Identity:

Not generally known

Education:

Post-graduate degree, presumably a PhD

Former Occupation:

Research scientist and possibly a college professor, although the latter was never made clear.

Known Allies:

For a time, J. Jonah Jameson funded Smythe's research and operated some of the Spider-Slayers himself

Known Relatives:

Alistaire Smythe, his son, who would blame Spidey for the Professor's death and come after him with even bigger Spider-Slayers.

Legal Status:

Criminal record.

Major Enemies:

Spider-Man

Marital Status:

Unknown

Place of Birth:

Unknown

Real Name:

Spencer Smythe

Usual Bases:

New York City

Background

Professor Spencer Smythe was a robotic and arachnid expert. Before he asked J. Jonah Jameson to fund his projects, he studied an alloy from a meteor. His assistant, Mark Raxton, tried to steal the substance and was accidentally covered by the material, becoming the Molten Man.

After watching a demonstration showing that Smythe's robot could sense and track spiders, Jameson hired Smythe to capture Spider-Man. Jameson himself controlled the robot, meaning that Spidey found himself chased by a machine with Jameson's face; a truly terrifying prospect! Spider-Man escaped by leaving his Spidey suit wrapped in the robot's tentacles.

Smythe, annoyed at the inability of his robot to capture Spider-Man, began to obsess about the Web-Crawler, turning to crime to finance his research and constantly improving his robots, which he dubbed Spider-Slayers. He went about his turn to crime by installing video cameras around the city to track the movements of the police and his thugs, along with other criminals. Turns out the Slayers were more along the lines of Professor-Slayers: the radioactive materials used in the manufacture of the robots poisoned Smythe, dooming him to a slow and agonizing death.

Blaming Jameson and Spidey equally for his impeding demise, Smythe handcuffed the two of them together with a bomb scheduled to detonate in 24 hours, determined to make the two of them suffer the agony of inescapable death. Unfortunately for Smythe, his disease was too advanced for him to survive the 24 hours himself; he expired convinced he had killed off the two men responsible. Peter Parker, however, had a pretty good grasp of what made mechanical devices tick, and was able to abort the bomb by freezing its controls.

Spidey seemed to have seen the last of the Spider-Slayers but Spencer's son, Alistaire Smythe, took up with the Kingpin and started building his own killer robots.

Thanks To:

The assistance of the Marvel Chronology Project is gratefully acknowledged.

Some of the above information is extracted from the various versions of the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe and the more recent Marvel Encyclopaedias.

Appears In...

By Jeanne Burch

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