I'm sure Pappy or Karswell or someone online has printed this but when I saw it I couldn't pass it up. Marvel's (well, Atlas's) FIRST version of a "Spider Man," this from nearly a decade earlier than Peter Parker! The main character here actually looks like Ditko's Tinkerer character! Joe Maneely illustrated the cover which I've added after the story.
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As a service to those who fear giant spiders, I often make a point of explaining that such are, happily, an impossibility on Earth.
The strength of materials is basically a function of cross-sectional area, and this grows as the square of linear dimension. But the mass (and hence weight) of material is a function of volume, which grows as the cube of linear dimension. A big spider is less structurally sound. For example, a fall from a desktop onto a hard floor is usually enough to mortally wound a tarantula. And bigger spiders would have great trouble just hauling-around their own weight.
But even before they hit the limits imposed by that issue, spiders as we know them would suffocate if they were somehow increased in size. They use a system of respiration that doesn't scale-up as well as do lungs. (In a time before Pappy walked the Earth, when the atmosphere was richer in oxygen than it is now, spiders got rather bigger than they do now.)
I know this sounds weak, but before I read Daniel's remark that invoked my name and advanced age, I was about to comment that spiders are smaller now because of less oxygen content in the atmosphere. (I saw it recently on TV.) And I live in the mountains, so the air is thinner anyway.
So how come when Mrs. Pappy sees a spider it is suddenly (to her) "as big as a fist"? A spider doesn't have to be big in actuality to be big in someone's fearful imagination.
P.S. Maybe Karswell showed the story at one time. It's a fun story, but unfamiliar to me.
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