An unusual Spider publishing event happened right "out of the blue" in 1979. "Python Publishing" published the never-before-seen last original Spider novel, "Slaughter, Inc." (written by Donald G. Cormack), which was originally scheduled to have been published in 1944 as "The Spider" #119. Python published it as a one-shot mass market paperback in 1979. For copyright reasons, all of the characters' names were changed, the story was retitled "Blue Steel: The Ultimate Answer To Evil", and the author was credited as "Spider Page" (no doubt a sly reference to the novel's original author, Norvell Page). The Spider was recast in this book as a character named "Blue Steel". As with Pocket Books' modernized "Spider" editions, this paperback sported a modernized pulp cover painting featuring a non-costumed, but heavily armed, blond-haired hero (said to be an unused cover painting by artist George Gross, produced but never used for a Freeway Press reprint of another pulp magazine character, Operator No. 5). In 2012, Moonstone Books finally published the unpublished 119th Spider novel "Slaughter, Inc." in its original unedited form. The novel was reprinted yet again in 2018 by Altus Press as a "facsimile edition", this time designed to look exactly how "The Spider" #119 pulp would have looked had it been published in 1944.