Viz Media has announced that the creator behind My Hero Academia: Vigilantes will be penning a Spider-Man manga with artist Betten Court. Typically as bizarre as some Marvel’s crossover with manga titles are (like Attack on Avengers), the manga will take a hilarious premise and run with it to create a truly hilarious story.
The manga has a quite creative approach towards reinventing a famed member of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery: Doctor Octopus. Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus have had a lot of body-changing experiences of their own, given that the Superior Spider-Man was Doc Ock in Peter Parker’s body, but what the duo has upcoming for them in the new manga is not something that will have ever faced.
My Hero Academia: Vigilantes creator will make Doc Ock a Japanese schoolgirl
According to a blurb released by Marvel about the collaboration with Viz, the premise of the story will be something like this:
“After a battle with Spider-Man, the evil genius scientist Doctor Octopus falls into a coma. When he wakes up, his consciousness is in the body of Otoha Okutamiya, a middle school girl in Tokyo! Thus begins the strange school life of Spider-Man’s biggest rival…as a normal Japanese girl!”
This premise not only has a ton of implications for hilarity to ensue, but it will no doubt be one of the most hilarious stories that have come out of Marvel in a while. Given that the story is being penned by MHA: Vigilantes creator Hideyoki Furuhashi, the story is bound to have genre-specific humour, given that Vigilantes often pokes fun at tried and tested superhero humour. The manga is expected to be released in the Fall of 2024.
Marvel has been looking at Manga a lot more
Apart from the Spider-Man manga, There is also an X-Men manga, that will be released in November 2024. The synopsis for it reads:
“In X-Men, Vol. 1, Jubilation Lee is a teenager with a secret: she’s a mutant, the next level of human evolution, and has fantastic powers. All she wants is a normal life with trips to the mall to get away from her parents, but when the mutant-hunting robots known as Sentinels come after her, that normal life is pushed out of her reach! Discover the X-Men—mutant heroes hated and feared by a world they’re sworn to protect—alongside Jubilee in this classic manga series releasing Fall 2024.”
Along with these releases, Marvel is also looking to release a Deadpool: Samurai colouring book. These are not Marvel’s first ventures into creating manga, given that the Marvel Mangaverse exists.
However, there does seem to be a more company-wide push to produce more content beyond comics and films, to keep its audience as diverse as possible. While animation has never been Marvel’s strong suit, perhaps there will be an anime too? Something other than Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers? Only time will tell.
