"Squadron" supreme: The Comic Treadmill continues its look back at "All-Star Squadron" with an excellent analysis of Issues 17-20 of the '80s series:

"As a super-hero Tarantula was as fascinating as rabbit turds, but he was one of the most fleshed-out personalities in the series. I have a theory on this - when Roy wrote the Tarantula into the series he was scripting a character that was Roy if he had been alive on Earth-2 in the 1940s. Like Roy, Tarantula was an author who wrote about super-heroes. And Tarantula was far more interested in finding out what made the heroes tick then he was in becoming a top-notch crime fighter. Tarantula's Golden Age costume was nearly identical to Sandman's Kirby version. Roy quickly changed it (dropping the cape after it got caught in a door and he realized how dumb it was to have a cape - instantly making Tarantula smarter than any other caped hero)."