Back
Spy x Family, Mission 1 (Paperback, 2020, VIZ Media) 4 stars

Review of 'Spy x Family, Vol. 1' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

According to wikipedia Tatsuya Endo came from a single parent household, enjoys skiing and basketball, as well as performances by bruce lee and meg ryan. Previously Endo has worked on the series Tista, about a villain killing serial killer sniper, and Gekka Bijin/The Moon Sword.
But circling back to Spy X Family, a comedy action spy story, the premise is that a male spy must quickly fabricate a family in order to infiltrate an elite school. "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... What he doesn’t know is that the wife he’s chosen is an assassin and the child he’s adopted is a telepath!" Reading other reviews, this volume appears to be set in a fictionalized east west Germany situation.
While the art felt pretty typical, that doesn't stop it from being very top notch and on point. With a very keen eye to detail.
Gender and sexuality are an interesting sub text. While none of the characters are necessarily labeled in the story as queer, the premise feels like it relates very well to how queer people have been forced to live through history. The single apparently cis female character is in danger precisely because she is not part of a heterosexual procreating unit and this chosen family is up against an elite school that won't stop talking about "family values".
And while the main characters are not necessarily blue color icons, the high class nature of the elite school is repeatedly highlighted.
Similarly, disability isn't really portrayed in any way, with everyone being somewhere on the spectrum between able bodied and super able bodied.
Whiteness is fairly central to the story, like most European set manga.
A real sucker for comedy premises in 2020, for obvious reasons, I ended up rating this first volume four out of five stars.