For an original manga, the series is remarkable in how closely tied into Marvel comics continuity it is. In his afterword in the first volume, writer Furuhashi explain how he became enamored with "one of Spider-Man's more antiquated and obsolete villains", Doctor Octopus.
Essentially, he read a Japanese translation of The Superior Spider-Man (the Dan Slott-written series wherein Otto Octavius swapped his consciousness with that of Peter Parker and thus becomes Spider-Man for over a year). His excitement of that particular storyline led him to read about a decade's worth of Spider-Man comics, those published between 2009 and 2019, made him see the villain in a new light, and, ultimately, to create this manga, in which he could introduce readers to "a new perspective on the appeal of Doctor Octopus."
Charmingly, he also wrote that his ultimate goal was to someday have one of the "western comics" include a cutaway gag referring to the events of Octo-Girl, which has a premise that might sound pretty bonkers in its description, but is really not that big of a leap from what Slott and Marvel were doing with the characters during their storylines.
If you haven't read Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol. 1 (and I would certainly recommend you do so!) or even my review of it (you do read every single thing I wrote, don't you?), that premise is this: After backing himself into a corner during a fight with Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus attempts to transfer his consciousness from his current, seemingly-about-to-die body to a pre-prepared clone one, but due to various circumstances, his mind accidentally ends up in the body of a Japanese school girl who was in a coma.
She soon "wakes up", though, and so the mind of Doctor Octopus is now "sharing" a body with middle-schooler Otoha Okutamiya. After acquiring a spare set of metal arms from a Japanese safe house of his, cutting Otoha's unruly long hair into his signature bowl cut and trying to violently assert his dominance over her misfit school "chums", Otto and Otoha reach a sort of arrangement.
Using a high-tech device disguised as a cute octopus hairclip, the two can switch control of Otoha's body back and forth, and the person not currently in control can still communicate with the outside world. That communication is often accompanied by a hologram of one of them, being projected from one of the wondrous metal arms (And thus readers get to see plenty of Otto, even though his body, which Spidey actually saved from splattering on a New York City street, is stuck in a hospital bed in America, seemingly in a coma).
In the first volume, the pair agreed to work together to try to get Otto back in the right body, which meant stealing a particular brain scanner of his invention that was then being used at a Japanese hospital (the scanner's earlier usage on the injured Otoha was part of the circumstances that landed Otto's mind in her body).
There were, of course, complications.
First, there was the appearance of Sakura Spider, a multiversal Spider-Man variant that ended up in our world (Apparently introduced in the Deadpool: Samurai manga, according to Furuhashi's occasional behind-the-scenes info provided between chapters, as well as a page of flashbacks involving Deadpool). Then there was the fact that Otoha's classmate and estranged childhood friend seemed to be working on something high-tech and possibly nefarious in a warehouse. And some drama involving the weirdest of Otoha's classmates. And, in the first volume's cliffhanger ending, there was the appearance of another Marvel character: The Superior Octopus, which is Doctor Octopus' body in a clone composite of Peter Parker and Otto Octavius. ("It's kinda like... ..if you and Spider-Man had a kid together?" Otoha says of the clone, to which Otto replies, "Silence! Such phrasing is unseemly! Rather, I have improved upon my archrival's power.")
I haven't previously encountered this particular version of a Doctor Octopus-in-Spider-Man's-body character before personally. As you can see on the cover of this second volume, he looks a bit like a Spider-Man with Doc Ock's arms and with a white, black and green-highlighted costume. (This character, it is explained, is apparently a "past" version of Otto's consciousness, which must have been uploaded into a clone body when his system kept trying to do so after the original mix-up that led to Otto and Otoha sharing her body).
In this second volume, Furuhashi and Court give us a backstory of another of Otoha's classmates who is in on the secret, rounding out the character in the same way they did with a girl in the first volume. This also adds another player to Otto's growing Japanese girl gang.
In this volume, our heroes—or perhaps I should say "protagonists", given Doc Ock's insistence that he's not a hero—spend the better part of the book's page count in conflict with Superior Octopus.
Discovering the truth about Otto/Otoha, he captures her and takes her back to his warehouse HQ, where he plans to delete the villainous Otto consciousness (the original and up-to-date version) from Otoha, freeing her and permanently disposing of a supervillain (Superior Octopus is still in a trying-to-be-a-superior-superhero phase, which the original Otto has since gone through and gotten over).
It's up to said girl gang to help Otto get back in control of Otoha's body (and the octopus arms) so he can defeat the Superior Octopus; this he ultimately does by using Otoha's hijacked body as a sort of human shield. That is, he can beat the hell out of Superior Octopus with his metal arms, while S.O. refuses to land a blow on an innocent little girl.
The conflict ends in a draw. Though Otto is perfectly willing to kill off the Superior Octopus, he's saved by the appearance of Otoha's childhood friend, now wearing a high-tech, bird-themed super-suit that she has invented, making her look a bit like a new version of a Vulture.
The rest of the volume tells us more about Otoha and her friend's childhood, the tragedies they experienced, and their falling out. Takoyaki, the Japanese snack made from octopus tentacles, is involved, as I suppose was inevitable in a manga featuring octopus-themed superhero characters. The friend now wants to use her super-suit to gain vengeance against a corporation she holds responsible for the death of her father.
Spider-Man also appears, albeit in a single, brief scene set in New York, wherein he fights and defeats the streaming super-villain Screwball. This seems to suggest that we haven't yet seen the last of Spidey in this series, and that he will eventually interact with our protagonists again.
The pleasures of the series first encountered in the first volume remain the same here in the second. A megalomaniac and genius who thinks he knows better than everyone, Otto Octavius is a fun character, and it's especially fun to see him dealing with problems he himself finds trivial, like those faced by a middle-schooler, problems he can't help himself from trying to solve, even while protesting how ultimately unimportant they are to a man of his stature.
And Court's depiction of the lead is great, as her expressions and demeanor so drastically shift, depending on whether Otoha or Otto are in the driver's seat of her diminutive body.
Court is also great at the action, of which there is a great deal, choreographing the often-inventive uses of the various characters' metal tentacles. (As spectacular as the various fights are, and as dramatic as the scenes of the Octopuses looming menacingly on a pair of their arms might be, I think my favorite images in this volume are those of Superior Octopus in "disguise", in which he wears a wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat over his extremely conspicuous-looking costume. I find it especially funny as, earlier in the book, we see him out-of-costume on the streets of Japan, where it is of course easy enough for him to blend in.)
The situation obviously lends itself towards humor, of which there is also a lot, but the story sort of covers similar ground to the Slott and Marvel stories it is inspired by. That is, Doctor Octopus repeatedly sliding into regular acts of heroism. Even this version of the character, who has already attempted to be a superhero and found that it brought him nothing but suffering and that has thus re-embraced villainy, seems to have an innately heroic side that can be coaxed out in the right circumstances.
This volume ends with Superior Octopus and the Vulture-like girl going to storm a corporate headquarters together, Otoha declaring that she will eventually make-up with her friend, even if it seems like the next step will be to have Doc Ock fight to stop her.
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Interestingly, this volume includes and eight-page "mini-comic" at the end, which was a tie-in to the 2023 movie The Marvels. Furuhashi introduces it by saying it was meant to be less of an ad and more of a primer on the characters and, amusingly (at least to me), he writes, "Doing the necessary research took quite a bit of time"...
Yeah, I imagine tracking Marvel's "Marvel" characters over the course of some 55 years of characters changing codenames and costumes took a while, let alone then trying to reduce, say, the history of Carol Danvers into a single splash page and some 25 words of text.
Sure, it's fun to see Betten Court drawing Carol, Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan, Movie Nick Fury and, on the opening page, seemingly all of the Captains Marvels ever. But, as someone who has written so much about super-comics continuity over the years, here on my comics blog as well as in articles intended for "civilian" readers, I found some of Furuhashi's statements fun to read.
For example, here is the first of two pages devoted to Captain Marvel Carol Danvers:
This is Carol Danvers.
Formerly Ms. Marvel......Now Captain Marvel.
After a complicated sequence of events...she inherited the title... ...and the weighty responsibility that comes with it.
Yes, "a complicated sequence of events" is a nice simplification of the typically byzantine history of a superhero, and can be applied to like, just about any of 'em at this point.
I also liked the page devoted to Monica's history:
And this is Monica Rambeau. She's gone by a number of code names... ...which is plenty common for heroes with long careers.Again, true. And it is certainly a gentle way of saying that writers, editors and publishers often flail about with what to do with some characters, especially one-time legacy characters that aren't successful enough to hold that legacy name forever, but are popular enough to keep around, so the publisher has to keep trying to find something that works for them...
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