Spy x Family Review: How Many Copies Sold By Ninth Best-Selling Manga (2022)?

By Aarush Sharma On Jun 29, 2022

The Japanese manga series Spy X Family was created by Tatsuya Endo. The plot centers on a spy who must “create a family” in order to complete a mission. He is unaware that the lady he agrees to marry is a trained assassin, as is the girl he adopts as his daughter.

Since March 2019, the series has been serialized biweekly on Shueisha’s Shonen Jump+ app and website.

In April 2022, TV Tokyo and its affiliate stations debuted the Wit Studio and CloverWorks version of an anime television series, which had been licensed by Muse Communication in Asia and Crunchyroll globally. A follow-up installment has been scheduled for October 2022.

The series has approximately 21 million volumes in circulation as of May 2022.

Spy x Family Plotline Summary

A Westphalian agent with the codename “Twilight” is charged with spying on Donovan Desmond, the head of the National Unity Party in Ostania, in order to preserve the state of peace between the opposing nations of Westalis and Ostania.

The only way Twilight can get near to Desmond, who is notoriously reclusive, is by enrolling a child in the same private school as Desmond’s sons and passing herself off as another parent.

He adopts Anya, a young orphan girl, marries Yor Briar, and takes on the alias Loid Forger in order to achieve this and project the appearance of a content family.

Yor is a Skilled Assassin

Unbeknownst to him, Yor is a skilled assassin, and Anya has the ability to read minds. Yor and Loid are unaware of each other’s true identities, and neither is aware that Anya is aware of their real occupations.

Later, the family adopts Bond, a canine with precognitive skills.

Twilight must develop the skills necessary to play the role of the ideal father and husband in order to complete his task, despite these unknown variables and his sporadic instances of common sense failures brought on by years spent as a spy.

Spy x Family Reviews and Ratings

Crossover99 praised the first 11 chapters of Spy Family, calling it “a fantastic comedy about a dysfunctional family thrust into eerie circumstances that never turn out as intended due to their distinctive characters.”

He referred to the family dynamic of Yor as the “stupid character,” Loid as the “straight man,” and Anya as the cute youngster “that readers fall in love with” as the ideal formula for a comedy.

He thought, nonetheless, that Yor’s comic potential as the stupid character was underused.

Hannah Collins of Comic Book Resources praised the first volume as one of the top manga publications of the year. She wrote that Endo’s artwork was highly praised “Even in animated or live-action media, creating an action-comedy takes skill.

That takes significant artistic talent to accomplish it in still photographs so well.”

The reviewer referred to the artist’s variety of facial expressions as his secret weapon, which he uses to win over readers, particularly with those of Anya, who, in the reviewer’s words, “steals every page she appears on.”

Spy Family volume one does a fantastic job blending entertaining espionage action with lovely family moments, according to Morgana Santilli of The Beat.

As described Endo’s work is “clean and inviting,” making his satire of post-war Berlin simple to identify. Santilli compared the humor to that of another Cold War-related series, From Eroica with Love.

According to the survey, Endo exploits a premise that could have produced a “typical, clichéd, action manga” to create one of the funniest current series.

Lee agreed with the other critics in praising Endo’s artwork, stating that he is particularly adept at action sequences and creates “expressive panels that genuinely show you how the characters are feeling.”

Spy x Family Copies Sold (2022)

Upon the publication of its second book in 2020, Spy Family had 800,000 copies in print overall, including digital and physical sales.

With the publishing of volume three, this figure surpassed 2 million, and volume four saw a circulation of 3 million. The series’ volumes three and four were among the top 30 best-selling manga of 2020.

A first for a Shonen Jump+ series, volume six’s first print run of nearly 1 million copies. Spy Family had more than 8 million digital and hard copies in use as of its release in December 2020.

11 Million Copies Sold in 2021

With more than 4.5 million copies sold in that year, it was the ninth best-selling manga at the time. Spy Family circulated 10 million copies by May 2021, and 11 million copies by the following month.

Volume six of the series became the second in a row for the series to start at number one on Oricon’s weekly list of the best-selling manga with 537,558 copies sold in its first week.

The manga had over 12.5 million copies in circulation as of November 2021. With almost 4.9 million copies sold in that year, it was the ninth best-selling manga.

15 Million Copies Sold in 2022

Before the anime’s premiere on April 3, 2022, and just after the publication of volume 9, more than 15 million copies of the manga were in circulation.

Over 21 million copies of the manga were in circulation as of May 30, 2022. Between the final month of 2021 and the first five months of 2022, it was speculatively the fourth-best-selling manga.

As of volume 6, the series has sold one million copies in France.

Conclusion

This anime is fundamentally a story about family, and how different views of status and privilege have a profound impact on how we perceive the perfect family.

Despite not being the main subject of Spy x Family, the film nonetheless manages to make a powerful point about how much harder it is to struggle to acquire a certain position if you weren’t born into it.

The Forgers will stop at nothing to maintain the appearance of their ideal family, even if they are aware that the fate of the planet is not at stake.