[4] Steve Albini had just ended his group Big Black,[4] and was looking to switch to a musical project with a live drummer, instead of his Roland TR-606 drum machine.

Rapeman's initial 1988 releases included the mostly live recorded Budd EP, the "Hated Chinee" b/w "Marmoset" 7" single, and their sole album, Two Nuns and a Pack Mule.

Albini later played bass in live iterations of Pete Conway’s solo project, Flour, before going on to form Shellac and expanding his work as a recording engineer.

Albini discovered the manga through a friend who ran an import business, and found its combination of rape fantasies and the superhero genre "simultaneously utterly repellent and fascinating".

[10] In a 2021 interview with MEL Magazine, Albini said he had been ignorant of women's issues and had falsely assumed that many social problems, such as misogyny and homophobia, were already solved.