so it wasn’t some sort of comment on that, perhaps, that the character was made insane, was it, do you think?
Blimey! I hope not, it'd have been in extremely poor taste! The strip, ISTR, featured a strait-jacketed, lank-haired Spider wallowing in his own filth in a cell, whilst a psychologist discussed his murderous exploits. After that, things are a little sketchy, but I think it ends with the Spider either escaping, or being released, with the reader in full knowledge that he's about to resume his habits. The whole mag was full of dubious tales like that, a couple of the others featuring Kelly's Eye, and even briefly resurrecting Mytek the Mighty! The artwork for all was under-par too, of a quality far below that distinctive "scatchy" fine penmanship that a lot of these strips had in their original forms!
Never saw Zenith. Was it worth it?
I really liked it, though it was quite difficult to follow in the later stages! it started off literally with a bang, setting out its alternate reality with a WWII prologue which saw the Enola Gay dropping the first atom bomb on Berlin instead of Hiroshima, unfortunately as the UK's secret weapon, Maximan, is slugging it out with his Nazi counterpart Masterman in the ruins below. A statue of the fallen Maximan is erected in Parliament Square after the war, despite the fact that the government sent him into Berlin knowing about the American bomb - they were frightened of his powers.
Things then jump forward to the "present" day, ie: the early 1990s, and we're introduced to Zenith, a pampered pop star, son of two members of the 1960s hero group Cloud Nine (by then all either dead, missing or powerless - or so we think at first!), and the only active superhuman. He gets drawn into the plot when someone starts killing off the remaining Cloud Nine members, and is forced into battle when Masterman apparently returns from the dead and turns up in London, creating havoc...
After that, things start getting bizarre, with Luthor Arkwright-like parallel universes (for some reason, the DC Thompson heroes come from Alternate 666), pan-dimensional Lovecraftian nasties, and all manner of plot twists.
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/z/zenhist.htm explains what went on far better than I could, as well as providing a scorecard of the old heroes who appeared (and, it has to be said, horribly killed in the most part. Still, at least the majority of them were shown to have a heroic fighting exit!)