Spencer Smythe

Spencer Smythe
Spencer Smythe and his Spider-Slayers
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics
First appearance	The Amazing Spider-Man #25 (June 1965)
Created by	Stan Lee Steve Ditko
In-story information
Species	Human
Abilities	Robotics Arachnid expert

Spencer Smythe is a fictional character, a comic book villain in the Marvel Comics universe. He is the father of Alistair Smythe.

Spencer Smythe first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #25 (June 1965) and was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

Professor Spencer Smythe was a robotic and arachnid expert who asked J. Jonah Jameson to fund his projects, having become convinced by Jameson's editorials that Spider-Man was a menace. 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 Spider-Man found himself chased by a machine with Jameson's face. However, Spider-Man escaped by leaving his Spider-Man 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. However, no matter how deadly or powerful he made them they were always defeated by Spider-Man utilizing a key flaw in their designs; the second one, for example, was capable of tracking a unique energy signature generated by spiders, but was defeated when Spider-Man lured it back to Smythe's laboratory, causing it to overload from the multitude of spiders Smythe kept there for his research.

Eventually, Smythe's criminal career came to an end when the radioactive materials used in the manufacture of the robots poisoned him, dooming him to a slow and agonizing death. Blaming Jameson and Spider-Man equally for his impending 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 that he saw them as having condemned him to. Unfortunately for Smythe, his disease was too advanced for him to survive the 24 hours himself, and he expired convinced that 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 mere moments before it would have detonated.