Merge:Alistair Smythe

Alistair Smythe is a comic book supervillain created in the Marvel Comics universe. He was one of the main foes of Spider-Man. At one point Alistair was confined to a wheelchair, but he later gained the ability to walk after transforming himself into what he called the Ultimate Spider-Slayer.

The Spider Slayers
The spider-slayers were a series of robots that sought to destroy Spider-Man. The initial generation of spider-slayers were created by Alistair's father, Spencer Smythe and commissioned by J. Jonah Jameson. After Spencer failed to kill Spider-Man - and ended up getting destroyed as a result - Alistair inherited the legacy from his father and gained a new-found hatred toward Spider-Man. He initially worked for the Kingpin but left in disagreement over how to deal with Spider-Man and went solo.

After being confined in an asylum, Alistair released himself and took several other inmates with him in order to construct a new series of spider-slayers that tracked Spider-Man across the city. His plan of revenge forced the inmates to assist in the machines' construction. After sending a series of slayers after Spider-Man (and all of their inevitable destruction with assistance from others including Scorpion and the Black Cat), Alistair lured Spider-Man to his residence for one final battle.

Ultimate Spider-Slayer
In order to defeat Spider-Man on his own, Alistair enhanced himself by encasing his entire body in a biorganic carapace that not only served as a full body armor, but increased his strength and gave him the ability to walk again by interconnecting with his spine. The physical structure of the carapace gave Alistair bird-like talons for feet; a long, curved blade-like weapon jutting from each shoulder; a pair of smaller, jagged blade weapons on each forearm; and a specially made web-shooter that fires from the forearm area. Eventually, Spider-Man defeated Alistair and made sure he'd been taken to custody as well as the other asylum inmates who survived the ordeal.

Cyber-Slayers
During Scarlet Spider's brief stint as sole web-slinger in town, Smythe (still carapaced as the Ultimate Spider-Slayer) started a war with a new set of slayers he intended to sell on the black market. These Cyber-Slayers--which could be controlled remotely by turning one's thoughts into the slayers' actions--were probably named as such because the initial target was not Spider-Man nor Scarlet Spider, but Lady Octopus and her crew. However, as fate would have it, the Scarlet Spider ended up in the middle of things and temporarily allied with the Cyber-Slayers, a fact that did not go over well with Smythe.

Smythe's Return
Smythe found his way outside prison and sought revenge on both Spider-Man and J. Jonah Jameson for the death of his father. He coerced Jameson to alter the stories in the Daily Bugle or else he'd kill JJJ's wife and son. Once Spider-Man caught on to Smythe's trail, he followed it back to the Bugle where Smythe assaulted him with recreated versions of every spider-slayer ever sent after Spider-Man in the past plus a pair of new creations--a miniature model designed to latch onto Spider-Man's face and penetrate his mind through use of radiation and a larger six-armed model arguably stronger than any other created. While attached to Spider-Man's head, the miniature spider-slayer psionically connected to Spidey's mind, copied thoughts of his loved ones, and broadcast that information to all the other mini-slayers. Smythe gave Spider-Man the choice of either stopping them or preventing the six-armed slayer from destroying Jameson. Spidey eventually shut down all the spider-slayers at the same time, but it was Jameson who knocked out Smythe with a baseball bat for threatening his family. Smythe recently made another return in which he used a poisonous spider he made and attacked John Jameson, aka Man-Wolf and caused him to end up in the hospital.

Smythe on television
On the Spider-Man animated series that was originally aired on Fox in the early 1990s, Alistair witnessed his father's failure to destroy Spider-Man (which, as in the comics, caused his apparent death), and was convinced to create spider-slayers to later attack Spider-Man as part of a deal made with the Kingpin. Smythe became Kingpin's primary accomplice for some time, even after Smythe's slayer failed to kill Spider-Man. His association with Kingpin came to an end after the two-parter "Framed/The Man Without Fear", when Spider-Man and Daredevil teamed up to fight the Kingpin, resulting in the arrest of Richard Fisk. Angered at his son's arrest, Kingpin blamed the incident on Smythe's "incompetence" and turned him against his will into the Ultimate Spider Slayer Cyborg with the help of the Kingpin's current replacement partner, Herbert Landon. Breaking free of Kingpin's programming and recovering his father's body (which had been kept alive in statis by the Kingpin unbeknownst to him initially), Alistair found another employer in Silvermane, who promised to fund research to revive his father. His father was never revived throughout the series. Smythe appeared in the series finale of this show in the Scarlet Spider's reality, as he was a cyborg but an assistant to the Kingpin. When the Spider-Men from different realities foiled Spider-Carnage's plan of destroying all reality, Spider-Carnage escaped through a portal in another dimension and when the Kingpin's building blew up, Madame Web used her powers to rescue the Spider-Men and Kingpin but Smythe seemed to have end up dead in the explosion. Alistair's voice was done by Maxwell Caulfield.