New Spider-Man Manga Aims To Be Most Crowd Pleasing Yet

Spider-Man is in no way new to the manga scene: the first Japanese adaptation of Spider-Man was Spider-Man: The Manga in 1970. Even with the early establishment of the character in the Japanese medium, there hasn’t exactly been a standout success for the character there. Honestly, the first thing most fans will think of when they think of “Spider-Man manga” would probably be Peni Parker: a character created by American rock musician Gerard Way.

The key factor, I believe, is that Peni is cute. Kawaii, in fact. And that plays well with both American and Japanese audiences. It’s the same reason why Unbelievable Gwenpool had a ton of support in Japan. She’s adorable. To quote Gwenpool herself, a “sweet and earnest marshmallow.” Too often, foreign adaptations try and skew more gritty, and this can only be a mistake. The people want schmaltz. The people want camp. The people want American cheese.

At first blush, Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior seems to be treading the same tired ground. But, thanks to the exclusive cover reveal from ScreenRant, we can note some excitingly kawaii trends right off the bat.

Now, this isn’t Spider-Man’s first cute manga. Spider-Man J and Marvel Mangaverse created popular enough (read: cute enough) Spider-Man iterations to be included in Spider-Verse crossover events. The first look at the cover of Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior is very exciting because it's not only cute—it's interesting. The combination of different styles, even in this one show with these characters, is so cool. The stylization of Spidey’s suit with the big eyes and the janky linework makes him look more buglike, and that’s so rad. Kingpin looks like he’s straight out of One Piece, and Hyo, the new character, looks straight out of My Hero Academia. The marrying of all of these very different and very popular styles is sure to make an extremely interesting and attention-grabbing visual story.

But Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior isn’t stopping at being kawaii: they’re pulling out all the stops and bringing in FIVE fan-favorite characters for this plotline.

That’s right, we’ve got Peter Parker, we’ve got Miles Morales, we’ve got Gwen Stacy, and we’ve got Kingpin. It’s basically the plot of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse if you send them all back to Edo-Japan. Which is cool. But that’s not all! They didn’t want to just give you a Japanese, time-traveling Into the Spider-Verse; they also wanted to give you Venom! Our favorite symbiote has also been brought into the mix to add some chaos and to (hopefully) more organically bring in a Japanese original character. Like, we can’t have a Japanese medium written by Japanese artists and not have any Japanese characters. How lame would that be? But this way, we won’t spook American audiences by bringing in too many unfamiliar characters at once. We have to give them time to adjust—Western audiences are very skittish.

And this, a combination of unapologetic fan service by shoving so many favorites into one story combined with the adorable aesthetic we love and expect from Japanese media, is giving us camp. It’s giving us the American ideal of cheesy comic book stuff—why we read comic books—in a slightly different cultural package. And I think that’s beautiful.

Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior was created by Shogo Aoki, and the expected release date is September 16, 2025.