The Spider, but who was otherwise a faceless phantom. The big mystery of the origins of The Spider magazine is that they were not one, but two, writers named R. T. M. Scott. The first was the father to the second. Reginald Thomas Maitland Scott was one of the most famous writers of the 1920s. His son, Robert Thomas Maitland Scott, was new to the writing world. In fact, the younger Scott worked on the staff of Popular Publications during the 1930s, and periodically contributed to their magazines under the pen name Maitland Scott.