This review contains spoilers.

If somebody said it was a happy little tale, if somebody told you this was just your average ordinary manga, not a care in the world, somebody lied. Today we’re taking a bit of a different journey, one that involves discussing comics. This may come as a surprise to many, but I’m not someone who reads many western comics. I sure enjoy manga, but when it comes to western, especially American, comics I can’t say I’ve explored a lot. There is a reason for this, and it was honestly best summed up by graphic novelist Scott McCloud, “The world of comics is a huge and varied one.” The simple fact of the matter is that for a long time I felt like there wasn’t a lot of guidance when it came to comics, especially superhero comics. There’s so many interpretations, continuities, and stories that I just struggled to find a clear answer on where to start. Yes, this is highly ironic given I am a fan of “Lupin III” and also enjoy the occasional “Gundam”. But all of that said I have enjoyed the comics I’ve read like “Watchmen” or “The Last Ronin” and I would consider myself a fan of today’s topic, Spider-Man. The Sam Raimi trilogy holds a special place in my heart, regardless of what people on the internet say about them. I consider Peter Parker to be one of the most unique and distinct characters in American pop culture. And the “Spider-Verse” films are some of my favorites from recent years which have introduced me to some of my new favorite characters, Miles Morales and Miguel O’Hara. I love “Across the Spider-Verse” so much I’ve read the original 1992 run of “Spider-Man 2099” and really enjoyed it. I don’t know if any of that is seen as good enough in the eyes of the Comic Book Guys of the world, but I’ve never courted their feedback. There is something interesting about this divide between western comics and manga though. Some people, like McCloud, treat manga as another part of the world of comics as he featured characters like Astro Boy and Arale Norimaki in “Understanding Comics”. But there are also a lot of manga fans who are quick to try and establish a difference between manga and comics, usually out of a perceived notion that manga are inherently more mature or artistic which is ignorant in too many ways to discuss. Regardless of where you or I stand on this topic we can agree there’s areas where things blur and we see comics influenced by manga and vice versa. And on occasion we even get to see mangaka have their way with other people’s creations. With that we can finally get to the 1970 manga “Spider-Man”, written by “Genma Taisen” creator Kazumasa Hirai and illustrated by future artist of seinen hits like “Sanctuary” and “Crying Freeman” Ryoichi Ikegami.

This manga is a strange and curious case. One thing I want to make clear is this is an official work, it isn’t some doujinshi that became infamous in otaku circles like CLAMP’s old projects. This was localized into English at one point, though heavily censored and left incomplete. I say this because this feels like a work that has been almost erased from Spider-Man history, there aren’t many people who talk about it. Sure if you go out of your way you may find a video or article discussing it, but this appears to be more of a footnote than something with any meaningful impact. If you want to know how deep this seems to go let me ask a question, who was the first non-white Spidey? When I try searching this question I mainly get articles about Miguel or Miles, which is odd given Miguel predates Miles by almost 20 years but anyway. My next question is who is the first Asian Spidey? The results you’ll find through Google all talk about Takuya Yamashiro from Toei’s 1978 tokusatsu series. But this manga predates all of them. It precedes the death of Gwen Stacy by three years. I may have found the first Spidey of color, if any such character comes before this please let me know, yet the internet doesn’t acknowledge this fact. Unfortunately, I can understand why this is. In order to discuss this manga one has to actually read it and, sadly, this is probably one of the more unpleasant manga I’ve read in recent years. My initial experience with it left me feeling so negative towards it that it couldn’t fully escape my mind. So I read it again thinking I may have been too harsh only to discover it earns every bad thought I’ve ever given it. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, what have you done to Spider-Man? Let’s discuss.

His name is Yu Komori. He got bit by a radioactive spider and for some time he was Japan’s one and only Spider-Man. I think you know the rest. He saved the city, became a hero, saved the city again, was demonized by the press to push newspapers, had his identity stolen, lost his girlfriend, made friends with a drug dealer, smoked some crazy weed, was kidnapped by communist guerillas, had a series of surreal encounters with supernatural women, let a symbolic tiger maul people to death. What, you mean that’s not how it usually goes? Okay, all jokes aside I think the most important thing to explain about the manga is Yu is explicitly his own person and not a Japanese Peter Parker. I do consider this a wise decision especially because the ways Yu deviates from Peter are so dramatic that he would never pass as a reskin of Peter. He’s a very dry personality, doesn’t tell jokes, doesn’t have friends beyond a minor character named Araki, never had an uncle let alone one that dies, and regrettably Yu is a far less likable character than Peter. Yu is a strange kind of protagonist because I feel as though his personality isn’t well defined or consistent and simply gets shaped into whatever Hirai needed him to be in the given moment. One chapter he’s supposed to be seen as a humble nerd, then suddenly he’s drunk off the glory of being Spider-Man, then he’s a cynical mope, then he says he wishes he could use his powers to hurt people, and we never build up or lead into to any of this. A lot of moments with his character feel very sudden and part of that is due to the manga having a rather slap dash pace to it. There isn’t much context given for why he creates the web shooters or his suit, he gets bit and then a few pages later he makes them. This weird inability to establish things also affects the way his powers are presented. Generally speaking his powers function like Peter’s, or they start that way. He’s incredibly agile, strong, can stick to surfaces, has a spider sense, and is very resilient. As the manga progresses though the spider sense stops being an instinctive way he’s alerted to danger and suddenly allows him to see in the dark and sense the before mentioned invisible tiger? Miguel can see perfectly in the dark, but his senses are heightened due to his unique circumstances and he also lacks the spider sense. With Yu he randomly says out loud he can see in the dark and later randomly states he can see the tiger, these two abilities are never addressed beyond these context sensitive moments. Also bullets just ricochet off Yu’s body which by all measures should leave him pretty overpowered, except Hirai doesn’t put this to much use as if he forgot. You’re a very strange character Yu. He stinks and I don’t like him.

Going back to his behavior for a minute, a lot of chapters don’t seem dictated by his actions and instead feel like him reacting to outside pressures. A lot of this manga will have characters going on these long tangents to Spider-Man and he will usually internalize it in his inner monologue. The problem lies in the fact that Hirai seemed to want to make this a manga detailing how awful humans can be and as a result Spider-Man continuously validates this. This manga, and by extension Yu himself, is so nihilistic that it sometimes left me wondering if the people behind it even like Spider-Man. The development of its narrative only furthers this. Structurally this is an episodic manga, which is perfectly fine to do for a hero like this. The first six chapters are good and part of this is due to their use of villains and elements from the Spider-Man canon. They feature Electro, the Lizard, Kangaroo, and Mysterio. No Green Goblin or Doc Ock, which feels like a missed opportunity. These chapters feature popular parts of Spider-Man lore like having him work for a newspaper, struggling with the tragic consequences of heroism, an attempt to quit being Spider-Man, and the discovery that what he does is a necessary good. But after that sixth chapter with Mysterio the manga breaks away and starts to operate off new material. This in itself isn’t a problem, the problem is these original ideas and stories are so callous and pessimistic. They honestly do feel like they’re embarrassed by the Spider-Man IP and are trying to correct matters by subjecting the reader to what they perceive as “mature themes”, and Yu’s character reflects it all back to you in his insufferable pseudo intellectualism. Spider-Man feels used considerably less and even when he is used it doesn’t provide the reader any comfort from the manga’s darkness. Too often he validates or proclaims the hopeless melancholy of Hirai’s writing as some deep truth. It’s a joyless world and story with a main character who feels like he exists as a means of letting the author air out his grievances. Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, even Miguel O’Hara are very earnest yet flawed and remarkably human characters which is why people are as attached to them as they are. Yu just feels like Hirai’s mouthpiece both because he lacks a secure foundation to his character and because of how erratic his writing is. I never read his other works or watched the “Genma Taisen” film so it’s difficult to say if this is simply how he writes or if he doesn’t understand or like Spider-Man enough to have been tasked with this job, but it makes for an abysmal read. Say what you want about the Raimi films, one thing we can clearly gather from them is he at least likes Spider-Man.

Something I want to make clear is I don’t have a problem with a more mature spin on Spider-Man. As a character there’s always been a unique way that certain real world topics get explored so a darker, adult orientated iteration of him doesn’t feel out of line. In fact that’s what “Spider-Man 2099” is on some level and it works. But the way the manga attempts this is not only wrong, its insulting. I just wrote about how bleak and misanthropic the story can be, now we have to get to an even heavier topic. I don’t use this word lightly, but the manga is so quick to feature sexual violence against women that it reads as misogynistic. A prime example lies in Yu’s love interest Rumi. Rumi is not an alternative Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson, her story is she’s Yu’s pen pal from Hokkaido who moves to Tokyo to reconnect with her brother who is revealed to be Electro and dies fighting Spider-Man. She has no parents and with her brother dead she’s forced to support herself by working in a night club where strange, usually older men take her out for dates. All of this isn’t awful conceptually, but the way they go about it is frankly gross. She begs Yu to stop visiting the club because it could intervene with his aspirations of becoming a scientist and even describes herself as a “dirty woman” for the things she does to earn a living. In a later chapter she is raped and then hit by a car which leads Yu to seek out a serial killer who’s method is hit and run accidents. As she lays dying she once again berates herself for being unclean and I’m supposed to see this as a beautiful tragedy when it just leaves me uncomfortable. This manga features a lot of rape to the point that it reads as highly tasteless and Rumi’s fate just comes across like another way for Hirai to exploit female suffering. Her character, along with many other female characters in the manga, is that of a chronic victim who has little to no character beyond the way in which men hurt her and it’s all in the service of Yu. Her pain doesn’t belong to her, she’s a cipher, it’s done to make Yu feel bad and lament the ugliness in the world. And yet this still isn’t the tipping point where the manga never recovers, that came earlier.

There is a chapter where a young woman resembling Rumi is attacked by a group of rapists that Yu successfully fights off, but she mistakes him for one of her assailants. This leads to a disgusting false accusation story where Yu chooses to take the blame because one of the rapists was a star athlete at his school and he didn’t want to reveal he used his super strength to fight them. I’ll say it again, Yu makes the decision to take the fall for a group of rapists. This isn’t the action of a hero put in a difficult situation, the ones benefiting from this choice are the rapists. He’s not protecting anyone except them, certainly not the victim. I used to watch Sam’s Channel on Youtube and he once said rather than aspiring to be like Spider-Man we should want Spider-Man to be like us. Well, in this case I do want him to be more like me because I’d never do this. He does eventually try to set things right, but the false accusation carries over into another chapter that shows his female classmates fear him. He wishes this could end, but insists on letting it play out because it could force him to expose his super powers. Spider-Man chooses to be a rapist’s patsy partially out of a sense of self preservation. There must have been a way around this, after all he just beat them up he didn’t do anything supernatural, but Hirai doesn’t seem concerned with that and eventually this story beat goes away with no resolution. I’m left feeling exhausted and then we get even more stories with rape against young women because this apparently wasn’t enough. My review, and especially my discussion of this topic, I know is already getting quite long. However, I do want to address a story in which a woman with mysterious hypnotic abilities lures out the innate darkness in those around her, think Junji Ito’s “Tomie” except bad, and one of the key plot points is her magic makes the male teachers and students rape the female students and faculty members. I don’t understand why you’d want to write this, let alone in a Spider-Man story. Something that I want understood about me though is I’m not someone who automatically shrinks at dark subject matter. My first review on this site was for “Berserk” which is one of my favorite manga of all time, my favorite anime film and one of my favorite manga is “Akira”, I own copies of “In the Realm of the Senses” and “Salo” and consider them important works of art. And a key reason the extreme content in those projects succeeds while this fails is I see a meaningful purpose to it. When I read “Berserk” I see a narrative built around three sexual abuse victims, two of whom are male, and how they react to their trauma. When I read “Spider-Man” 1970 I see a series of stories where women, and only women, are sexually abused as a means of reminding you life sucks and Spider-Man can’t do anything about it.

It really is a shame that the manga takes such a negative turn because the earlier chapters show a lot of promise. Ikegami’s art, while not yet achieving the quality of his later material, has a nice 70s aesthetic that reminds me of “Ashita no Joe” in some ways. I’ve always liked his art and while there is a homogeny to the way he designs faces in this manga, he does still do a good job. And those initial chapters dealing with the classic villains are good. They’re oddly paced, but they’re the period where the manga is easily its most fun. We get to see this manga’s spin on a J. Jonah Jameson character and it’s a sub plot I wish was woven through the whole manga. Yu trying to reconcile with a public that quickly turned on him despite his heroics would have been compelling if it was taken further. And to be completely honest some later chapters, including the final one with the tiger, could have been great if Hirai restrained himself. The final story is about an invisible tiger born from the primal rage within the heart of a fallen pop idol. She was expected to be the next big star, but wasn’t compliant enough with her label so they arranged for an all male band to rape her and leave her with an STD and ruined reputation. If we isolate this story from the others that featured sexual abuse it doesn’t handle it all that poorly. We get to see her voice her pain in a way that doesn’t service Yu’s character and for the early 70s this story feels ahead of its time. This is more than two decades before “Perfect Blue” would rip idol culture to shreds and it does a pretty good job at it. Again, with some restraint in certain areas it would be great. The finale where Yu let’s her tiger rampage against her abusers could have honestly worked if it wasn’t in the service of a message about humanity at large and instead had a more focused message on a corrupt industry that sees women as commodities. Even Yu’s cynicism could have been acceptable if there was an arc to it all and an actual point. Maybe he could have started as a nihilist who, through developing these powers and special encounters with other people, sees that dissolve and make way for genuine altruism. And then I realize I’m describing what Araragi went through in the “Kizumonogatari” films. But I digress, many things about Yu and this manga could have worked under different writer. And, unfortunately, I have to judge the manga for what it is and I’m sorry, I don’t like what I see. It feels spiteful towards the property it’s adapting from, throws away any goodwill it mustered in its earlier chapters, Yu is a very unlikable and confused protagonist, and it all feels cold and empty. I don’t recommend it even if someone is just incredibly curious, there are better uses of your time. If a comic fan who’s never touched anime or manga were to ask me about it, then I’d rather just guide them towards the works I actually love such as “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” or “Yu Yu Hakusho”. And with that, the review is finally over. Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: "With great power comes great responsibility." This is my gift, my curse. Who am I? I’m myvelouria.