Winds of Change.NET: Spider Man Goes to India

February 4, 2005

Spider Man Goes to India

by Joe Katzman at February 4, 2005 5:16 AM

Oxblog's David Adesnik notes that thanks to an agreement back in June 2004, Spider-Man is going to India - as an Indian superhero in Mumbai (Bombay). Their challenge is to preserve the core of who and what Spiderman is, while altering him for an Indian cultural context. How is that going to work (well, it seems)? Just how universal are America's most cherished comic-book ideals? And what could this mean for the future?

The first 4 issues of Spider Man India will be published and released by Gotham Entertainment Group in India, and the title isn't in their rotation yet. Marvel Comics will provide publishing details for the States at a later date. Fortunately, we have some preview artwork of Spider Man India for you, in addition to David's excellent discussion.

Printer-friendly Version

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.windsofchange.net/windsopcentre-cms/trackback.cgi/4003

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference
"Spider Man Goes to India"

Comments

#1 from jinnderella at 10:37 am on Feb 04, 2005

Joe, I think this is important, and very cool-- I have always believed that manga would be the ultimate vector for spreading America's memome. :)
Japanese manga embodiy a lot of American values already-- because of post WWII infuences?

#2 from Balasubramani at 5:17 pm on Feb 04, 2005

I think it's a good thing as well, but we should try be not so possessive about ideas that others have embraced for eons. Doing your duty (via zen or karma) is something deeply rooted in Indian (Eastern) tradition. We're not really exporting anything American except the brand--which is being tweaked.

#3 from BigFire at 7:06 pm on Feb 04, 2005

The first iteration of Spider-Man I've read was the Japanese version of this character (Marvel licensed this character to a Japanese manga publisher). It was years later when I read Spider-Man in English. And the Japanese version works rather well.

Post a comment

Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:

*This* puts text in bold.

_This_ puts text in italics.

bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.

To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.

Finally, note that a constant onslaught of Trackback spams from auto-generated blogspot blogs has forced Winds to ban the blogspot.com domain from use in comments or trackbacks. If you host on blogspot, consider moving; otherwise, the complaints need to be directed at Google not us.