Norvell Page, a prolific pulp author, wrote most of these; almost all the rest were written by Emile Tepperman and A. H. Bittner.

Most of the cover art was painted by John Newton Howitt and (for the last few years of the magazine's run) by Rafael de Soto.

The manuscript of an unpublished Spider novel by Donald G. Cormack was discovered in 1978 and published in 1979 as Legend in Blue Steel.

[14][20][21] Page took a job in the Writers' Division of the US Office of War Information in 1943, and Popular asked Prentice Winchell and Donald G. Cormack to submit Spider novels.

[22] Winchell's novel, When Satan Came to Town, appeared in the final issue, dated December 1943,[23][24] after which Popular cancelled the magazine because of the paper shortages caused by World War II.

[11] There were other similarities between Smith and Wentworth: both were masters of disguise, both had gray-blue eyes, and both were close friends with a woman who shared their adventures, but never married them.

[26] Smith's love interest was his secretary, Bernice;[26] Wentworth's was his friend Nita Van Sloan, who occasionally took on the identity of the Spider herself.

As a result Wentworth frequently found himself battling the police, but he rarely returned their fire—"only to make them jump", in the words of pulp historian Robert Sampson.

[28] From a cunning artifice contrived at the bottom of his cigarette lighter, [Wentworth] withdrew a tiny seal and pressed it upon the forehead of the dead man.

There, close to the small hole, was clearly depicted, in rich vermilion, the tiny outline of an ugly spider ...[29] The two novels by Scott that launched the series established many plots and ideas that would reappear over the next ten years.

Van Sloan was frequently caught by the villains, forcing Wentworth into danger; in some novels she fell into the criminals' hands several times.

[30][14][20] The master criminals included the Red Mandarin, a Fu Manchu-like archvillain, and Ssu Hsi Tze, who used poisonous animals to kill everyone working at a bank before robbing it.

[11] When Tepperman took over in 1936 he re-used some of the tropes he had written for other pulps such as Operator #5: villains cutting their victims almost in half with machine gun fire, or causing innocent bystanders to "stampede in blind panic".

[19] For example, Bittner's The City That Dared Not Eat, which appeared in October 1937, featured criminals who were planning to secretly sell human flesh as meat.

Robert Turner, who began working for Popular at about this time, recalled "doing some heavy rewriting on the Spider 'novels' because the style seemed to be old-fashioned pulpy; too much action and too little emotional involvement".

[33] The first issue included a short fictional biographical sketch of the Spider (probably written by Terrill), titled "The Web".

[34] This became an occasional feature, conducted by Leslie T. White, Linton Davies and Moran Tudury, the last few being credited only to "The Chief".

Arthur Leo Zagat's stories about Doc Turner, a crime-fighting New York pharmacist, often featured in the magazine, as did Tepperman's series about Ed Race, a juggler known as the Masked Marksman.

[30] Other writers included Frank Gruber, who contributed four stories about Captain Douglas March, a crime-fighter; G. T. Fleming-Roberts; and Wyatt Blassingame.

Popular Publications sold many thousands of these; Steeger commented that "Every kid in the country must have wore [sic] one at one time or another.

"[39][40] Popular also sold a mechanical pencil with a concealed rubber stamp that would print an ink image of a spider.

Interior art was mostly contributed by J. Fleming Gould; these almost always included sketches of Wentworth and Van Sloan, as well as illustrations of action sequences from the novel.

[46] Robert Sampson gives May 1936 as the last issue for which Terrill was responsible; Sampson then lists Loring Dowst (June 1936), Leon Byrne (July – October 1936), Linton Davies (November 1936 – November 1937), Moran Tudury (December 1937 – December 1939), Loring Dowst (January 1940 – August 1942), Harry Widmer (September 1942 – March 1943), Beatrice Jones (June 1943), Robert Turner (August 1943), and Ryerson Johson (October 1943).