In the mid-1970s Pocket Books reprinted four Spider novels (originally published as pulps #16, 21, 26 and 100), featuring "modernized" pulp cover artwork by Robert A. Maguire. In this series, The Spider (renamed simply "Spider") was portrayed as a non-costumed, heavily armed muscular blond-haired hero (similar to James Bond). These paperbacks also failed to sell, and the series was canceled. These four novels were re-edited and heavily modernized so the stories didn't faithfully reprint the original pulp tales, one of several reasons why they may have never caught on with their intended audience. In the reprint of "Death and the Spider" for example (originally published as pulp #100 in 1942), Nita Van Sloan is shown driving a Jaguar E-type X-KE, a sports car not created until 1961, some 19 years later.