Hello, readers.
Guess who's pounding away at the keys of a brand-spanking new laptop, little internal motor just purring away? I'll give you a hint: he's the man sitting at the keyboard and the one writing this to you right now.
And, in more important news: A shopping trip yesterday led me in the direction of a far-off library, so as best to combine with our trip to the big-box store. Not expecting to find much, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Spy Family Vol. 1 on the shelves.
(And, yes, I know there's an X in there between Spy and Family, but, until I hear otherwise from an official source, I'm going to pronounce it and write about it in the same way as we do Yoshihiro Togashi's Hunter Hunter, without the X.)
In a world that greatly resembles 20th century Europe, the neighboring nations of Westalis and Ostania are currently engaged in a sort-of-Cold War involving espionage. Westalis' top agent is a cool and professional man known only by the codename Twilight. In order to get close to a reclusive rabble-rouser (cool alliteration completely unintended), Twilight's managers have tasked him with taking both a wife and child (as his own fake family, not as hostages) in order to get close to him at the private school his child goes to.
Unknowingly joining Twilight (alias Loid Forger) in this endeavor are the socially-clueless Yor (the sham wife) and the adorably precocious Anya (the daughter).
Oh, but what's this-Yor is secretly an assassin and Anya's secretly a telepath?! And none of these fake family members know any of these secrets about each other?!
Why, what wacky hijinx will ensue!
In all seriousness, this manga series is actually better than I thought it would be, and I already thought it would be pretty good (for a reason that I will mention below). The art is good, the action scenes are simple enough to follow and the humor is en pointe in the standard Japanese style (everything is going smoothly until something outlandish occurs out of nowhere and then we laugh at it).
But the character work is where Spy Family really shines. Twilight is more than just an efficient and professional spy-he's a man from a war-torn country who had a rough childhood and wants to make sure no one else in Westalia winds up with a childhood as rough as his. Yor at least appears gullible enough to believe the strange lies that Twilight comes up with for his spy-related escapades, is embarrassed to have once worked as a whore, and does all of her assassin work to help pay for and educate her unseen little brother. And Anya is as well-written as any average, non-magic kid: book-dumb and eager to live with Twilight and Yor because she sees living with them as an adventure.
(Albeit because she's a mind reader and knows right away that they are a spy and an assassin, respectively.)
And there may be even more just waiting to be discovered behind these facades. For example, Anya is stated to have gained her powers from an accident at a research facility, which she escaped from. She has also been adopted out of the orphanage where Twilight finds her many times, but always to be returned for unknown reasons. Plus she has surprisingly little state/social data, even for an orphan.
But they all slowly grow to love each other.
In conclusion, let this image tell you more about the tone of the story than I ever could...
During a firefight to escape his enemies, Twilight liberated a stolen diamond ring. But he lost it. Instead, he makes his proposal with the firing pin from a hand grenade. He makes his marriage vows, however fake, to Yor as he almost casually flings the grenade into the enemy, overlaid with the image of a proper man placing a proper ring on a proper woman's finger, culminating just as the grenade explodes.
Now that...that is art, my friends.
PS: As I said earlier, I already knew of this manga's existence, from a Youtuber I follow named Mother's Basement. Check him out in the link below, and maybe watch his "Must Read Shonen Jump Manga" video to learn more about this and other new noteworthy Shonen Jump manga: https://www.youtube.com/c/mothersbasement/videos
