Eric Needham was a troubled youth, under the grip of drugs which led him into a life of crime. Forsaking the addictive influences that held him in their thrall for years, Eric immersed himself into training to make him a skilled assassin in order to remove the gangs fed by the drug traffic trade that poisoned Gotham City of Earth-One.
Thomas Hallaway as Spider sought to be a modern day Robin Hood, using his archery skills to plunder the ill-gotten gains of criminals to help support his own lavish lifestyle. Aided by his chauffeur Chuck who drove his specially designed Black Widow which seemed to defy gravity, Spider's primary weapons were specialized flaming arrows and rope lines. He would fight a variety of both normal and costumed criminals during a two-year period on his home world of Earth-Two.
As the Black Spider, Needham incorporated high-caliber rifles and other weaponry as one-by-one he eliminated the kingpins of crime in his city, bringing him to the attention of his fellow vigilante the Batman of Earth-One. Seeing the Spider's brutal form of justice as irreconcilable with true justice, Batman battled and defeated Black Spider.
After several confrontations with his one time role model, Black Spider decided that he need to ally himself with several of Gotham's supervillains in order to defeat their common foe. As for the Spider, he joined Uncle Sam's Freedom Fighters, migrating to the parallel world of Earth-X to battled the Axis Powers. There, Hallaway would lose his life but redeem his reputation.
Hallaway left behind on Earth-Two his best friend and chauffer Chuck, and the vehicle Chuck drove named the Black Widow. This revolutionary all-terrain automobile could traverse multiple surfaces, and was a key tool in the Spider's war on crime throughout his 30 chronicled adventures.
Chuck's doppleganger on Earth-One was a chauffer named Ivor Evan, who tirelessly and faithfully ferried around his mistress Pamela Isley... in both her civilian identity and in her criminal alter ego of Poison Ivy. While the limousine he drove wasn't exceptional like the Black Widow, it was sufficient.
And rather than pilot a revolutionary state-of-art car like the Widow as had Chuck, Ivor personally controlled a different type of creature when Ivy transformed him into a human-plant hybrid creature that battled Batman until his defeat.
After both Ivor and the woman he adored were incarcerated, she escaped prison and joined together with other fellow felons such as Black Spider as they sought revenge against the Batman. So while Ivor never worked for Black Spider, and Chuck had never worked for Doctor Poison... there was still a connection between these too poisonous predators on Earth-One.
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