String Play Spider Baby

About

String Play Spider Baby (Japanese: ストリングプレイスパイダーベイビー) refers to a frame of a man striking the yo-yo trick "Spider Baby" in a Japanese comic Moero Spinner (燃えろ! スピナー) written by Takashi Hashiguchi.^[1] This frame has been a popular subject for photo collages on the Japanese imageboard community Futaba Channel (2chan) due to its surrealistic lulz.

Origin

Moero Spinner is a pilot version for Japanese yo-yo comic Chosoku Spinner (超速スピナー)^[2], also known as English title Super Yo-Yo in the US. It serialized 2 episodes on a Japanese monthly boy comic magazine CoroCoro Comic in 1997, and included in both a yo-yo technical guide book "Hyper Yo-Yo Techniques" released in the same year and the 1st volume of Chosoku Spinner released in 1998.

The frame is taken from a double-page spread where a young man called Kenichi Nakamura or Master Nakamura (中村名人; Nakamura Meijin), the national yo-yo champion in Japan who also appears on Chousoku Spinner, is demonstrating several yo-yo tricks to the protagonist boy. Master Nakamura is striking "Spider Baby" in a small frame on a corner of the pages.

"String Play Spider Baby!!"

For Japanese viewers, this English name of this trick and his proud face with overmuch saturated linework on the background look very unfit to that too simple string trick without any dynamic movements because English names usually sound like grandiloquent to Japanese sensibilities. Therefore, this frame creates a weird atmosphere and causes surrealistic lulz to viewers.

The Technique

"Spider Baby" is a string trick, previously called as string(s) play in Japan, that hangs a sleeping yoyo in the reversed "Eiffel Tower".^[3] Here is a tutorial video for "Spider Baby" performed by Kenichi Nakamura (中村謙一)^[4], a famous Japanese spinner or yo-yo player who led the Hyper Yo-Yo boom in late 1990s of Japan and the model of Master Nakamura in that manga.

Spread

This small frame in an old comic finally came to be known at Futaba's Nijiura boards in October 2006. Nijiura users were soon fascinated by its surrealistic lulz and set the frame to a subject for their favorite photo collage works. Since then, "String Play Spider Baby" has been loved by Nijiura users perennially. A large amount of their photo collage works are collected in Futaba's private archives, and some of them are reprinted to a Naver Matome page.^[5] In addition, this manner has also spread to parody illustrations in the Japanese illustrators community pixiv.^[6]

Notable Examples

Photo Collages

Compilation

Illustrations

Template

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Futaba relating websites basically prohibit people from introducing their URLs in the external. Do not write the URLs in articles or comments. Please use search engines.