order to get crucial information (as is shown in his Year Five assault on Fred Christ). Like Channon, he had also gained experience in firearms while in school, though unlike Channon, he and his classmates had had to make their own arms—to prevent the teachers having an unfair advantage. He often uses improvised weapons to gain the upper hand—for example, putting his cigarette out in the eye of a guard or beating Fred Christ with a broken chair leg, which he dubbed "The Chair Leg of Truth". Appearance Initially, Spider is shown with a huge amount of muddy brown, shaggy hair and a long unkempt beard, claiming he has hair in places that his once and future editor/friend Mitchell Royce doesn't even know he owns. On his return to the City, nearly all his hair is removed by a malfunctioning cleaning unit in his first apartment's bathroom. For the rest of the series, he is portrayed as virtually hairless, the exception being his eyebrows and a small amount of pubic hair. Spider is a small, slight figure with a long nose and slightly crooked teeth. His body is covered with black tattoos, combining geometric tribal designs and other more Western images (his right buttock is marked "kiss here"), including a small spider on his upper forehead. He is also said to have a tattoo on his penis, though this is never shown. Although he prefers not to wear clothes much of the time, when in public his primary mode of dress is typically a "black linen suit, urban weight, generous cut" (jacket and pants, no shirt under the jacket) with a pair of heavy black leather boots, although during the winter he is sometimes seen wearing a black jumper under his jacket; also, on the rare occasions when modesty is required of him he will wear knee-length boxer shorts. He also wears a pair of 'live-shades', sunglasses with built-in still-photography capabilities; the right lens is green and rectangular, whilst the left one is red and circular (the AI that created them was on drugs at the time). The first pair he owns have gold rims around the lenses, while the ones he obtains during the second part of the Dirge arc have no rims. This appearance, and the comic's futuristic setting, has made Spider Jerusalem a cult (albeit fictional) character among rivet heads, in a similar manner to Tank Girl.