When I submitted the finished comic to Martin, he had a few changes to make. Most were very minor bits and pieces, like some extra colouring or a couple of spelling mistakes that needed fixing, but he also felt that the last page of the story needed to be rejigged a bit, so that's what I did.

I think Martin's suggestions were spot on, and made for a better ending, but here for your pleasure, as a dvd-style extra, is how the story originally ended.

And this is basically were we catch up with Arachnid in The O Men #19.
PANEL 1: The No Doubt poster on Arachnid's wall is from the album that has the song "Spiderwebs" on it. I originally had The Cure's Disintegration there, because of the song "Lullaby", but the album cover is a very complex image which would have been terribly unclear at this size. I'm showing my age with the Vauxhall Conference gag.
PANEL 2: The death of Money Spider, at the hands of Blackie, although she looks quite different drawn in my style.
PANEL 4: Arachnid doesn't regret his villainy at all. We're often told that realising our dreams is the key to happiness, but what if, like Arachnid, we get there by hurting people or otherwise breaking the rules? If this strip has a main theme, I suppose that's it.
PANEL 5: Originally, Arachnid was writing to Doctor O, but he's already been rejected by the Doctor, so it doesn't make much sense for him to be writing to him. I eventually realised that Abby, as a well-known journalist with an interest in the superhero community, would be a perfect person to send this confession to.
PANEL 6: He really does have an Arachnid Alarm! Also, the newspaper clippings on the wall were in the original issue, and I took them to be the way that Arachnid heard about his teammates dying, so that's why Money Spider appears in one of them. As it happens, it ends up looking a lot like Venom's collection of press cuttings in Amazing Spider-Man #300, but that's completely coincidental!
PANEL 7: This is Spider coming to kill Arachnid, as shown in The O Men #19. It's rather unclear as to what's going on, and you'd only get it if you'd read the issue in question, and even then it's not a certainty. It's really not a very good ending, and the slightly more expanded climax is both more clear in terms of storytelling and more dramatic.

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