10 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Spider-Man For Everyone‏

5. The Japanese Spider-Man Is A Murderous Creep

We're not talking about the nutty seventies Japanese TV Spidey; he was an emissary from hell, perhaps, but otherwise he was okay. Neither are we talking about Spider-Man J, the recent manga adaptation featuring a decidedly bishounen Peter Parker. No, we're talking about Ryoichi Ikegami's Japanese Spider-Man comics which took some...liberties with the character. Obviously the change in setting meant some different names, and art, from the Western Spidey comics. It also featured a whole lot else. Ikegami is somewhat infamous for his work for Kazuo Koike, the writer of Lone Wolf and Cub who, when not working on that classic crossover hit, busies himself with playing golf and writing comics that are the trashiest, most exploitative and offensive to come out of Japan ever (which is saying a lot). Spider-Man: The Manga is tame in comparison to some of Ikegami's collaborations with Koike, but it's still pretty far off from the depiction of Peter Parker we're used to. Apparently, what Japanese audiences wanted from the webhead was extreme violence, social revolution, kids getting run over by cars, multiple rapes, and an infamous scene where Yu - the man behind the manga Spider-Man's mask - discovers masturbation. In the US there's a generation of people who know Spidey as the survivor of child abuse; in Japan, there's a generation of people who know Spidey as the borderline insane sexual deviant star of a terrifyingly brutal gekiga manga. And if Marvel hadn't seen the good sense to censor all that stuff from their American translations of the book, we could've got the same in the West too.