Yu Komori: The Forgotten Manga Spider-Man Who Changed the Web-Slinger's Story in Japan

Picture Tokyo in 1970. American pop culture is sweeping across a rapidly modernising Japan: the first Burger King counters are opening, blue jeans are taking over the universities, and Marvel Comics signs an unprecedented deal with a local publisher that will give birth to the strangest Spider-Man ever published. A still-unknown young mangaka named Ryoichi Ikegami takes on the rights to the web-slinger and decides he is not simply going to translate him. He is going to rewrite him entirely, tear him away from Peter Parker, and turn him into pure psychological tragedy, a world away from the larky spirit of the American comics. The result? A character most British fans have never even heard named, whose existence stayed hidden for fifty years, and who nonetheless shaped the whole look of the modern spider multiverse.

His name is Yu Komori. And between 1970 and 1971, in the pages of the Japanese magazine Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine, he wore the web-slinger's costume in a parallel universe where he was a Tokyo sixth-former haunted by guilt, bullied by his classmates, terrified of his own powers. Seven years later, his silhouette would inspire a second, even more radical Japanese reincarnation: Toei's televised Supaidaman, who pilots a giant robot called Leopardon and who would unknowingly lay the foundations of the global tokusatsu genre that later produced the Power Rangers. This article retraces that whole forgotten double history, from Ikegami's cult manga to the recent canonisation of these Japanese incarnations in the web-slinger's multiverse arc. If you thought you knew every version of the hero, brace yourself: the strangest one was clearly missing.

Yu Komori, the Spider-Man nobody in the UK knows

Yu Komori is a young chemistry student living in Tokyo in a tiny bedsit, broke, solitary and frighteningly bright. Unlike Peter Parker, he has no Uncle Ben, no Aunt May, no Mary Jane. He is alone in the world, and his only mental refuge is the makeshift laboratory where he runs experiments on radiation. One stormy evening, a spider irradiated by one of his own devices bites him on the back of the neck. A few hours later he is scrambling up the walls of his block of flats in a panic. The basic framework deliberately echoes the American comics so that Japanese readers recognise the archetype, but Ikegami immediately pulls a radical switch: where Peter Parker takes charge of his destiny with optimism and humour, Yu Komori sees his powers as a curse. He doesn't want to be a hero. He wants to be normal again.

That obsession with getting back to normal shapes the whole series. Yu searches desperately for a cure for his bite, haunts clandestine laboratories, takes on shady jobs to fund his research. He crosses paths with yakuza, crooks and corrupt doctors. He doesn't fight supervillains: he fights poverty, social injustice and his own distress. The contrast with the psychology of the American Peter Parker is total. Where the New York web-slinger becomes a hero in spite of his doubts, Yu Komori stays a hero by accident, never by choice. That nuance, deeply Japanese, runs through all of Ikegami's work and gives it a psychological density the Marvel comics of the same era had not yet dared to approach.

The manga runs to five main chapters and has never had a proper release over here. For decades its very existence was passed around by word of mouth among collectors and serious fans of Ikegami's work, the future cult artist behind Crying Freeman and Sanctuary. Even today, searching for Yu Komori on the usual fan sites devoted to the web-slinger's universe, all you find are scattered mentions, often wrong. And yet this character has been canon since 2014. Marvel officially folded him into the main continuity during the event Dan Slott's Spider-Verse, where he appears briefly as one of the Spider-Men recruited to fight the Inheritors.

Ryoichi Ikegami, the artist who turned Peter Parker into a Japanese tragedy

To understand what makes the Yu Komori manga so singular, you have to understand who Ryoichi Ikegami was in 1970. Born in 1944 in Fukui, Ikegami was 26 and starting to make a name for himself in seinen manga, manga for adults. His style was already recognisable: a realistic, almost photographic line that broke sharply with the cartoon aesthetic dominant among his contemporaries. Where most mangaka drew stylised faces with huge eyes, Ikegami drew angular men, heavy stares, muscular bodies anchored in a brutally real Tokyo. He would later become one of the most admired artists in Japan, but at the time he was still finding his way. Spider-Man was his first genuinely big project.

The deal with Marvel went through the publisher Kodansha, and Marvel — then in an aggressive phase of international expansion driven by Stan Lee — gave Ikegami a free hand. A free hand no mangaka would ever be given again. Ikegami changed almost everything. The setting moves from New York to Tokyo. Peter Parker disappears in favour of Yu Komori. Mary Jane doesn't exist. Green Goblin and the black symbiote are absent — those classic villains would only turn up later in the American chronology, but above all because Ikegami preferred to invent his own antagonists: Japanese criminals rooted in a harsh social reality, yakuza, corrupt businessmen. The violence is raw, the sex sometimes implied, the tone generally dark. Nothing like the American comics aimed at teenagers at the time.

Ikegami's work fascinates the handful of Western critics who come across it years later. Many consider his Yu Komori to be, psychologically, one of the most pessimistic incarnations of the web-slinger ever produced. The series ends on an ambiguous note: Yu never finds his cure, never becomes a beloved hero, never finds love. He stays an inner fugitive to the end. For readers used to the bright tone of the New York web-slinger, it is almost unsettling. For lovers of seinen manga, it is an overlooked masterpiece.

What makes this work even more precious is that it foreshadows everything Ikegami would go on to do: the social bleakness of Sanctuary, the stylised violence of Crying Freeman, the moral ambiguity of Strain. The Yu Komori of those five Japanese chapters holds the seed of his entire inner cinema. And it indirectly inspired generations of seinen mangaka who saw a manifesto in this supposedly failed adaptation: you can take a Western character, tear him out of his context and make him into something else. Ikegami was one of the first to prove it.

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From page to small screen — the birth of Supaidaman in 1978

Seven years after the Yu Komori manga ended, Japan came back to the web-slinger, this time on television. In 1978 the Toei studio — the same one that would later produce the first big Marvel television adaptations — signed a deal with Stan Lee to adapt the hero as a live-action series. The deal was as strange as the one in 1970: Marvel gave the Japanese studio complete freedom, on the single condition that the costume stayed recognisable. Everything else could be changed. Toei took the chance to reinvent the character from top to bottom, once again, giving him a different name from the Yu Komori of the comics — not out of carelessness, but because the new version was aimed at a younger, family audience, and because it wanted to belong to the great Japanese tradition of tokusatsu, those handmade special-effects series where costumed heroes take on giant monsters.

The new hero is called Takuya Yamashiro, a young Japanese biker who receives his powers from an alien named Garia, the last survivor of the planet Spider, wiped out by the Iron Cross intergalactic empire. No direct link with the Yu Komori of the manga, then, but an obvious kinship: a young Japanese man haunted by a mission he never asked for, who has to wear the web-slinger's costume. The series runs to 41 episodes, broadcast between May 1978 and March 1979, and it lays down the visual groundwork for everything that followed in the genre. Takuya, or Supaidaman to Japanese viewers, leaps from rooftop to rooftop across a gorgeously shot nocturnal Tokyo, fires his webs from a band called the Spider Bracelet, and drives a transforming car named the GP-7 that can run up walls.

But Toei's real stroke of genius arrives fifteen minutes into the first episode. When a giant monster appears, Supaidaman doesn't fight alone. From a hatch above his GP-7 he summons a spaceship named Marveller, which transforms into a colossal battle robot christened Leopardon. It is the first time in the history of the genre that the two archetypes — the human-sized costumed hero and the pilotable giant robot in the Mazinger Z mould — fuse in the same show. Nobody had dared that synthesis before. Without knowing it, Toei had just invented the narrative formula that would dominate tokusatsu for the next forty years, right up to the American Power Rangers of the 1990s and beyond.

Leopardon, the giant robot that invented a new kind of superhero

Leopardon deserves a paragraph of its own, so absurd and yet so historically decisive is its existence. Picture the scene: Spider-Man, in his red-and-blue suit with its web patterns, standing in the cockpit of a fifty-metre white-and-red giant robot that drives laser swords into the belly of a latex kaiju. Everything pop culture would have called incoherent in 1978, Toei dared to do. And Japanese audiences loved it. The series pulled such ratings that Stan Lee himself, visiting Tokyo in 1980, publicly said he considered Leopardon one of the best things ever done with his creation — a quote American purists long refused to believe and which nonetheless appears in several Marvel archive documents.

The success of Supaidaman and Leopardon directly inspired the Super Sentai franchise from 1979 onwards, which would later become, after a few years of reworking for the American audience, the cult series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. No Leopardon, no Megazord. No Supaidaman, no Tommy Oliver. And so, by domino effect, none of the costumed-hero-with-giant-mecha aesthetic that today underpins a good chunk of children's pop culture worldwide. This lineage is rarely acknowledged in official histories of the genre, but tokusatsu historians have been documenting it since the 2000s. The Japanese web-slinger accidentally fathered an entire subgenre of global entertainment. The full arc of the web-slinger's great sagas largely ignores this transmedia dimension, and it is one of the most important.

Visually, Leopardon is a red, white and blue robot — exactly the colours of the hero's costume — with a massive torso, pointed shoulder pads and a helmet vaguely suggesting a samurai mask. Its main weapon is the Sword Vigor, which slices monsters apart in one spectacular scene in almost every episode. The repetition of that sequence became a running gag on the show and a nostalgic touchstone for generations of Japanese fans. Today, vintage Leopardon figures sell for astronomical prices on Japanese auction sites. For European collectors who discover the series exists, it is often a shock.

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Why has Yu Komori stayed so obscure in the UK?

The question deserves to be asked head-on. How is it that Britain, a country mad about manga since the 1990s and obsessed with the web-slinger since Sam Raimi's first films, completely ignored Yu Komori for half a century? The answer comes down to three overlapping factors. The first is commercial: the original manga never found a publisher of its own over here. By the time manga started breaking through, in the 1990s, Ikegami was known for Crying Freeman and Sanctuary, two series published in France by Glénat. But his 1970 Spider-Man stayed legally locked up: Marvel holds the rights to the character, Kodansha holds the rights to the Japanese work, and nobody has ever managed to bring the two rights holders together to authorise a full translation.

The second factor is cultural. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the web-slinger's image in Britain was dominated by the Fox Kids cartoons and then by Sam Raimi's films. British fans knew Peter Parker, Mary Jane, the Goblin, Venom. Nobody was asking whether foreign versions existed. And when Into the Spider-Verse popularised the idea of the spider multiverse in 2018, the film put the spotlight on Peni Parker, Spider-Ham, Spider-Man Noir and Miles Morales. Yu Komori doesn't appear. It would take the next instalment, or the trailers for Beyond the Spider-Verse, for him to resurface in the conversation here.

The third factor is purely editorial. The comics that mention Yu Komori in official Marvel continuity are few and far between. His first canon appearance in Spider-Verse #1 in 2014 is a cameo of a few panels in the middle of an armada of hundreds of Spider-Men. Panini Comics did publish it, but with no particular push, and readers here never grasped the character's historical significance. To work out who that hooded face in the margin really was, you already had to have read specialist Japanese or fan-scholar analyses of Ikegami's work. Prior knowledge the new fans simply didn't have.

The late canonisation — when Marvel rehabilitated its Japanese web-slingers

The official turning point comes in 2014 with the arc Spider-Verse by Dan Slott, which brought together for the first time every arachnid version of the multiverse against Morlun and the Inheritor family. Slott and his editorial team made the bold choice to include both Japanese Spider-Men: Yu Komori from Ikegami's manga, and the televised Supaidaman, Takuya Yamashiro, with his robot Leopardon. Both characters appear in several scenes, even get lines of dialogue, and take part in the final battle against the totemic hunters of the multiverse. It was the first time in fifty years that Marvel officially acknowledged their existence.

This canonisation is part of a wider Marvel trend of exploring its foreign corners. The publisher realised, around 2010, that it had left a creative gold mine dormant by ignoring its international adaptations. Spider-Man India with Pavitr Prabhakar, created in 2004 for the Indian market, becomes a recurring character. Spider-Man UK, with Billy Braddock, heir to a British line, earns his stripes. Yu Komori and Supaidaman follow the same path of rehabilitation. For Marvel this is not pure nostalgia: it is a commercial strategy to enrich the multiverse experience for fans, and to reconnect with the Asian markets that had been ignoring the web-slinger for decades.

The second high point of that canonisation comes with Across the Spider-Verse in 2023. Although Yu Komori is not named outright in the film, several Spider-Men glimpsed in the Spider Society scenes strongly evoke the Japanese designs of the 1970s. Sharp-eyed fans have identified at least one hero who recalls Ikegami's manga, and another whose mecha armour clearly evokes Leopardon. The producers confirmed in interviews that these nods were deliberate, a sign that the influence of tokusatsu and seinen manga on the modern look of the Marvel multiverse is now recognised.

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The hidden legacy of the Japanese web-slinger on global pop culture

Beyond Power Rangers, the influence of the two Japanese Spider-Men reaches far further than most British fans suspect. The dark tone of the Yu Komori manga inspired several mangaka who went on to produce famous works: Tsutomu Nihei (author of Blame!) has often cited Ikegami among his major influences, and his obsession with Kafkaesque urban architecture owes a great deal to the twilight Tokyo drawn in Yu Komori. Hiroaki Samura, the author of Blade of the Immortal, praised it in a 2009 interview. And more recently, artists like Inio Asano have acknowledged the influence of Ikegami's photographic framing on their own work. The sequence where Yu Komori climbs a Shinjuku skyscraper in the middle of a thunderstorm, back in 1971, has been imitated dozens of times in later works without the original source always being credited.

On the Supaidaman side, the influence on tokusatsu is even more direct. The series pushed Toei to create the first official Super Sentai franchise in 1979, which has since run to 47 series. The founding concept — one or more costumed heroes who fight human-sized monsters and then summon a giant robot for the final battle — is exactly the one Supaidaman had introduced the year before. When Saban Entertainment bought the Super Sentai rights in 1992 to produce Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the Japanese web-slinger's DNA travelled with them, without anyone in the United States realising it. The first-season Power Rangers, in 1993, are quite literally distant cousins of Supaidaman.

The influence goes beyond tokusatsu too. Modern Marvel films have started working in ever subtler Japanese references. No Way Home contains a brief scene where Peter Parker mentions one of his alternate Spider-Men as a hero who pilots a mecha, an obvious nod to Leopardon. Sam Raimi, who would later direct Multiverse of Madness, has said in several interviews that as a child he watched episodes of Supaidaman on a family trip to Japan, and that the robot-summoning scene marked him for life. The kaiju aesthetic of several recent films indirectly owes it something. Comparative analyses of the web-slinger's film versions rarely highlight this dimension, and that is a real gap.

Yu Komori and Supaidaman in today's multiverse — why they deserve their place

The debate is still alive in the fan community. Some purists argue that Yu Komori and Supaidaman should not be canon, because they were not created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and because their tone strays too far from the original spirit of the classic Peter Parker. Others counter that the multiverse would make no sense without these radical variations, and that the richness of the Spider-Verse arc comes precisely from that cultural diversity. Marvel's position, since 2014, is clear: both Japanese Spider-Men are official members of the ecosystem, on the same footing as the more recent versions of the spider multiverse. They take part in the big events, show up on variant covers, and feature in the official guides.

For the British fan discovering their existence today, the point is not just to tick a box on a checklist of obscure characters. It is to understand that the Spider-Man multiverse is far bigger and far more inventive than the films let on. Yu Komori is proof that one archetype can produce a raw psychological drama in the hands of a Tokyo mangaka. Supaidaman is proof that it can also produce an inventive, joyful TV blockbuster in the hands of a studio of special-effects obsessives. The web-slinger belongs to no single country, no single tone, no single medium. He is, in essence, multiple. And that is exactly why he has fascinated whole generations of readers and viewers on every continent for sixty years.

The adventure is probably not over. With Beyond the Spider-Verse on the way, the producers have hinted that even more obscure heroes will turn up on screen. Yu Komori would feature, according to several sources close to the studio, in a scene lasting a few seconds where you glimpse his hooded face in the crowd of assembled Spider-Men. If that is confirmed, it will be the first cinema appearance of this manga character forgotten for fifty years. For fans who grew up with Tobey Maguire or Tom Holland, a chance to discover a hidden, fascinating part of the web-slinger's story. For the serious fans who have followed the saga since the first comics, a cultural win they have waited far too long for. Every Earth in the multiverse has its own story to tell, and Supaidaman's Earth-7191, like Yu Komori's Earth-70019, deserve their moment in the light at last.

If you want to take the exploration further, dive into the pages devoted to the extended ecosystem of the spider multiverse and compare them with the web-slinger's other incarnations that the shop has already mapped out. You will find dozens of other little-known characters whose stories are worth stopping for. The Japanese saga is only one fragment of this vast multidimensional tapestry that makes every reread of the web-slinger richer than the last. And that is precisely what fans love today: an endless mythology, made of variations, branchings and forgotten little gems like Yu Komori and Supaidaman, which remind us that global pop culture is sometimes more connected than we think.