Spy x Family has almost doubled its manga availability worldwide since the anime began airing in the last two months.
Everyone knows the well-established worlds of Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba that rocked 2021 with their new seasons and the end of their manga serializations. Today, Spy x Family has taken the world by storm in spring 2022, with the manga adding 8.5 million copies to circulation since the anime began airing. Before the anime aired, there were 12.5 million copies since its first volume was published back in November 2019.
Spy x Family began its first run of serialization in the online magazine, Shonen Jump+, on March 25, 2019, and quickly gained traction, incrementally increasing its quantity of published work. The Shueisha manga editor, Shihei Lin, reported the manga had just passed 21 million copies on bookstore shelves and the anime had reached about 400 million views online. Here is the history of the copies added to bookstores in the past 2-3 years:
- 1 million copies in November 2019
- 2 million copies in January 2020
- 3 million copies in May 2020
- 4 million copies in July 2020
- 5.5 million copies in August 2020
- 8 million copies in December 2020
- 10 million copies in June 2021
- 12.5 million copies on April 9, 2022
- (Today) 21 million copies on May 30, 2022
Viz Media has been in charge of the English translation and publishing the manga for English audiences. This was the description of the premise of Spy x Family:
“Master spy Twilight is the best at what he does when it comes to going undercover on dangerous missions in the name of a better world. But when he receives the ultimate impossible assignment—get married and have a kid—he may finally be in over his head!
Not one to depend on others, Twilight has his work cut out for him procuring both a wife and a child for his mission to infiltrate an elite private school. What he doesn’t know is that the wife he’s chosen is an assassin and the child he’s adopted is a telepath!”
The Spy x Family anime premiered on Saturday, April 9, 2022, and fans have been eating up the wild, cute and action-packed story of the Forger family. The anime has taken the opportunity to lure in its audiences with the charismatic, psychic child, Anya, at its forefront and marketing. The story itself took a spy trope and flipped the script on a typical James Bond-like protagonist who has to accomplish a mission to save the world by relying on others for help—we all know what happened to Daniel Craig’s James Bond in No Time to Die when family was involved.
While the Forger family was not related by blood or normal marriage circumstances, they had many heartwarming moments on top of the espionage and danger. The manga and anime have both done so well for the series that the action figure company, Good Smile Company, revealed they would be making Nendoroids of the main cast: Loid (Twilight), Anya and Yor. The release date for these figures had not been provided yet.
Spy x Family is available in major bookstores such as Indigo Books & Music Inc. in Canada and Barnes & Noble in the U.S., or in some local bookstores as well. For online reading, readers could subscribe to MANGA Plus or Viz Media to read the manga at the same time it becomes serialized in Japan’s manga run. Audiences around the world can enjoy the anime on Crunchyroll in both subbed and dubbed, the series is still ongoing. Like many of the popular series, like One Piece and Naruto, Spy x Family will get a stage play adaptation in Japan, slated for spring 2023.
