[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1: [Digital edition only! Includes complete color pages from "Shonen Jump+"! Dr. Octopus, an evil genius scientist, falls into a coma after a battle with Spider-Man. When he wakes up, his consciousness is in the body of a Tokyo junior high school girl, Okutamiya Otoha! The strange school life of Spider-Man's biggest rival and a Japanese girl with "two legs and eight arms" begins now!
(Translator: DeepL)
A surprisingly thoughtful take on an extremely wacky scenario. Basically Doc Ock and a random Japanese middle school girl get Truck-Kun'd at the same time and through a series of wacky events the Doc's consciousness ends up in her body and they can kind of switch off who's in control based on the scenario.
It sounds insane, borderline cursed (though not completely unheard of given the popular Superior Spider-Man run where Ock controlled Peter's body which this is kind of riffing on), but it's actually really well executed and does a good job spoofing both superhero and manga tropes while telling a worthwhile story. Otto is given a lot of depth and while he is a boisterous egotist, we see a lot of his good side creeping in. There's a good series of life-flashbacks when he's "dying" at the start and the shot that struck me the most there was seeing him proudly holding his degree, hoping to make a difference in the world. Something about that drawing struck me and the even show it again later. The back and forth between Otto and Otoha digs into the two characters' worldviews, with Otoha believing in the value of helping people even though she has a hard time and Otto being more jaded but grudgingly helping out.
The story's core theme seems to be that every person has value and that people who seem bad are still human and can have good points. When we first meet Otoha's classmates, they come off like bullies and it looks like she's having a horrible time at school but we realize we haven't even seen all of Otoha's own experiences with them and that she's generally getting on fine. Something I liked is how even characters who seem like zany joke characters at first have a background and a story. Otoha's classmate Denko is a very bizarre character who generally shows up, does something wacky, and then runs away, almost like a sort of Mose Schrute-type enigma, nut we gradually see bits and pieces of why she's like that and what she has to deal with and suddenly you see a character you were laughing at in a deeper light. Finding that deeper light is what this book is really about and it really hooked me.
What also impressed me is how well it balances the Manga style with the Marvel style. I think the artwork hits a really good middle-ground between Western and Japanese styles. The opening fight feels like a classic Marvel comic and even in Japanese they do a really good job making Peter's quip's feel like the sorts of things he'd say. Peter Parker's Spider-Man is only really there for the inciting incident and a small bit later, but they do a "My back!" gag for all you enjoyers of Raimi memes. I like how they play off some of the Marvel tropes too, like the main character living with her aunt and at one point she says something like "A little power can become a little kindness". At the same time though, it never feels overly dependent on the Marvel universe and generally feels like its own thing. I liked that people in Tokyo are aware of some of the superhero goings-on but in more of an "Oh, I saw something about that on the internet" kind of way since they're so far from the New York epicenter of all the usual hijinks.
As far as the Japanese reading experience goes, this was surprisingly tough especially since I was expecting a sort of cute, goofy comedy. The first 20 pages alone had me adding way more words to my Anki deck than entire volumes of Super Mario-kun or Rayearth. There are large amounts of sci-fi technobabble, a lot of brain and medicine related words, and when Otto does a villain monologue he tends to speak in very flowery, over-the-top language that doesn't come up in normal conversations. The grammar itself is fine and the conversations between normal people are fairly easy, but the technical terms never really let up.
While this was a tricky read for me, I'm glad I stuck with it. If I'd known how hard it was before going in, I might have put it off for later, but the story and characters hooked me and that motivated me to keep going. Even if you're a bit put off by the bizarre premise, it's surprisingly well-done and compelling with great humor and a lot of heart.