Spider-Verse: Spider-Man The Manga

Spider-Verse is a currently running event in the Spider-Man comics that will involve every* Spider-Man we've ever met, including several Spider-Women and Spider-Girls (not to mention Scarlet Spiders and Spider-Hams and whatnot), and several brand-new versions. The premise is simple: there's a group of people trying to wipe out every Spider character across the multiverse, so all the Spider characters will team up to stop them. This is, of course, a massive event - multimedia even, since it will also feature in the Spider-Man Unlimited video game and the animated series Ultimate Spider-Man - and given the premise, it's only natural that it will add a few entries to this catalog.

*I say "every" because Marvel says "every", but there are a few that won't be showing up, such as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. (Although see here for more information on that.)

Today's entry is Spider-Man: The Manga.

In the 1970s, Marvel tried to bring Spider-Man comics to Japan, but they were not very successful. Instead, Japan tried again with Spider-Man: The Manga, originally written by Kosei Ono and drawn by Ryoichi Ikegami. The manga told the story of Yu Komori, a high school student who gains spider powers and starts to fight crime as Spider-Man. Overall the series was pretty faithful to the original comic, except that the radioactive spider came from Yu's own experiments and he didn't decide to start fighting crime because his uncle died (though he does have an aunt Mei). Originally the series adapted Spider-Man villains, but when Kosei Ono was replaced with Kazumasa Hirai, the book started to go in its own more violent, more sexual direction.

In Spider-Verse #2 (January 2015), a Spider-Man counters the idea that all Spider-Men are Peter Parker with the fact that he met a Japanese kid named Komori:

In case you're wondering about the other Japanese Spider-Men that Spider-Man Black mentions, you can find out more here and here. There's also another one, which you can learn more about by googling "Marvel Mangaverse".