You Should Be Reading “Spy x Family”

Recently nominated for an Eisner Comics Award, this manga by Tatsuya Endo is not only well written, funny, heartwarming, tense, and beautifully illustrated. It also succeeds from a marketing perspective, by knowing how to cater to various markets: if you like gag comics, if you like adorable children doing adorable things, if you like spy thrillers and political intrigue, or if you want to stare at the pretty spy and the pretty assassin being awkward around each other.

Spy x Family (2019-present, 47 chapters and bonus chapters), available from Viz

I don’t remember how I got into Spy x Family, but it quickly became mandatory reading with each release every other Sunday. Spy x Family had a bit of an uphill battle to get me to enjoy it. I had never read Endo’s previous works, TISTA and Gekka Bijin. What first introduced this comic to me was probably a combination of Viz doing heavy marketing for its first chapter, a friend mentioning the series, and seeing a lot of chatter about it on Twitter. I’m not someone who likes spy stories. While I do like seeing political allegories–and Spy x Family creates a world that you can imagine, built out of Cold War sensibilities with stand-ins for West and East Germany–you can also imagine that reminders of how screwed up our world is doesn’t always make for enjoyable light reading

But as I have said before, if something is really funny, that hooks me. And Spy x Family is one of the most memetic stories out there: the facial reactions from precocious child telepath Anya are infinitely repeatable for reaction images. Seriously, do a search online for “Spy x Family Anya,” and most images you’ll find are of Anya’s bemusement, smugness, shock, or exuberance for life itself. 

Did I say “precocious child telepath”? Oh, right, this series has a small child, Anya, who is a telepath. And her adoptive father, Loid, is a spy for one faction. And her adoptive mother, Yor, is an assassin for the other side. Only the spy and the assassin don’t know that about the other, while their telepath daughter does–while she has to keep her telepathy a secret from her parents, so that she isn’t abducted for experimentation and lose this family she loves.

Oh, and the family has a pet dog that can see into the future, and he’s named after James Bond.

This is a weird series.

As I said at the beginning, Spy x Family works where so many other comics don’t because it really does have something for everyone. 

You like school-based shenanigans? Anya has to navigate an elite private school, where her income and lack of education make her a pariah, even as the snobbish rich boy of an elite family has a tsundere crush on her.

You like spy thrillers and political intrigue? The story veers off of the adorable school stuff to focus on how war is hell, with grim descriptions and illustrations of neighborhoods decimated by bombs, terrorists looking to dismantle fragile peace through violence, and spy networks wrestling with means and ends. 

You want goofy off-the-wall stuff? We have a gambling den where the elite distract themselves with tennis matches performed by steroid-injected dopplegangers for the Incredible Hulk. 

You like awkward romances involving attractive people? Loid and Yor get the thirsty posts on Twitter for reasons.

The popularity and high sales for volumes of Spy x Family is a credit to Endo, whose previous series did not last this long, and especially when, unlike many weekly in-print manga, Spy x Family got this popular while being online only and biweekly.

There are some aspects of the comic that aren’t to my liking. I’m sure, as the story goes on, the politics will grate. Are any sides in this kind of a war justified in the actions they are taking? 

Gender representation also has its problems, although thankfully not in the roles women have in the series–Loid’s spy agency boss, in particular, has a tragic background against her steely resolve that I want to see explored further–but in how the series sets this ideal for women’s physical appearance and mocks other characters not reaching it. For example, a gag in one of the earliest chapters involves having Loid’s tech person crossdress as a woman to pose as his wife, and the joke is less “what, men shouldn’t wear women’s clothes, that’s silly!” (and also kind of old hat by 2021) and instead mocking how a man in a dress is not attractive enough to pass for what the characters think a woman should look like (which has all sorts of unfortunate implications). 

Then again, the series isn’t afraid to let humor and slapstick come out of women characters. One of the funniest chapters focuses on Yor suffering from a botched mission where she got shot–in the behind–and couldn’t treat the bullet wound herself. Now she’s stuck on a date with Loid, who doesn’t know about her assassin missions and misreads her physical suffering as personal irritation with him: at one point, she has to stand throughout a play because she’s in so much pain. While the normally composed Loid is freaking out that none of his hot-guy spy tactics are working on Yor, other assassins recognize her and want to get vengeance on her by poisoning her drink–but, given her tolerance for poisons as part of her training, it acts as a pain reliever so she can sit down and finally enjoy her date, to Loid’s absolute confusion.

But then again, Yor’s brother has a sister complex–because we can’t have nice things in this manga.

I don’t mean to discount legitimate concerns about these issues and how Endo handles them, but these largely seem to be so few in number and brief in comparison to so much good about this series that they are easy to overlook–and, while they will unfortunately still will be adapted into the inevitable though not confirmed anime this series will get, at least they are easy to skip past so you can get to the exciting action and comedy.