While Tatsuya Endo is best known for the manga Spy X Family at this point, the manga worked on many different titles. Often, certain themes or nothings feel like they’re recurring. This feels especially true with Tista a past title Viz Media picked up for localization following Spy x Family’s success, and it’s fascinating to see how Endo tells this clandestine tale after getting to see the Forger family’s adventures.
The star of this manga is Tista, a young college student known for her supernatural accuracy. She’s been raised as an assassin since she was a child by a church. While she starts out the series with something of an ordinary life, as she’s attending college, we quickly see the costs that come with the unnatural vision she possesses and trauma she experienced both due to the church and the missions she’s been forced to undertake. It’s definitely darker in tone than Spy x Family, though there are moments when her life is calmer than others.
In general, the concept feels familiar. Both Tista and Spy x Family play with the film noir genre. We’re seeing two secretive agents. One is a more violent agent acting as an assassin. The other is a spy whose “wife” is an assassin. There’s this balancing act where we see what their daily life is like. However, at the same time, flurried moments will involve leads taking on missions and even taking lives.
We also have that element of an “ordinary” person on the outside looking in. Here, it’s Arty. The two meet by chance on the street, and he asks for an opportunity to draw her. He learns the two both were attending the same school. However, after another encounter between the two during which he sees her other side, we’re watching his take on her life and that drive to learn more. While with Anya in Spy x Family, this can lead to more serious situations, Tatsuya Endo presents more realistic and dangerous repercussions and situations for Arty and Tista both in Spy x Family.
Image via Viz Media
Not to mention there’s also the idea that maybe Tista and Spy x Family’s Loid didn’t necessarily have the most “choice” when it came to their positions. Tragedies in Loid’s life left him feeling like becoming a spy was something he had to do. Tista was being groomed for the role as an assassin since she was a child, even to her own detriment. It also provides a fascinating parallel. While both Loid and Tista are doing things that would potentially be for the greater good, with her story we’re seeing how this more negatively impacts her life. With Loid, his need to form the Forger family ends up being a more positive and, in some ways, healthier development for him.
Put together and read alongside each other, both Tatsuya Endo’s Tista and Spy x Family manga series are fascinating. The way the two seem to play with similar ideas in different ways is enthralling. Especially since each one better allows us to appreciate the levity and gravity in the other.
The first volume of Tatsuya Endo’s Tista manga is available in English via Viz media. The second volume will appear outside Japan on July 4, 2023. The first four chapters are in the Shonen Jump digital vault. Viz also handles the English Spy x Family releases, and the anime is on Crunchyroll.
