The hook for Giant Spider & Me is a cute girl and a cute spider relax and hang out together after the apocalypse occurred. That’s about the basis for volume 1, which does it so with neat art and a desire to be easy to get into while also peppering in some story. The problem is that it’s not at all entertaining to read. Once you get past the hook with the spider, you mostly begin reading a story about a girl doing some cooking, and it’s not compelling enough with any of those stories.
Nagi, the main heroine in Giant Spider & Me, lives alone in a house in the woods in a world where the apocalypse happened, where buildings are submerged in water, and there’s not as many people around. One day she takes a stroll through the woods and finds a pumpkin, and then not much later, she meets a spider. Not just any spider — a giant one. After Nagi realizes the spider doesn’t intend to harm her, and, sensing the spider has nowhere to go, Nagi takes them in. For basically most of volume 1, they try and enjoy each other’s company with some success (and failures).
So, if you noted the “them” part, this is a big component in this volume as however Adrienne Beck (translator), Ysabet MacFarlane (adapter) and Jenn Grunigen (assistant editor) localized it, they made sure to not actually assign a gender to the spider, Asa. It does seem awkward to read “they/them” at first, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. How would Nagi be able to tell if it’s a he or a she? Well, she does try to study up on Asa, but there’s no real record of a spider that huge. Then in general it’s hard to tell a spider’s gender unless you’ve seen enough of them, so it does make sense.
Asa the spider, as Morino wanted, is drawn fairly cute and has cute reactions. There’s a moment when Nagi and Asa eat together where they both happen to pat each other’s heads, and it is pretty adorable and a bit sweet. There are a few more key scenes involving the two that show what the focus is, and that’s essentially Giant Spider & Me in general. It’s not, at this point at least, looking to be anything more than having its readers read a manga about a girl and the spider’s life together.
The problem is that the stories themselves aren’t all too great. Volume 1 essentially is a cooking manga, where Nagi cooks food for herself and Asa. Their moments together seem fun, but it doesn’t translate to me as anything special as I turn the pages. What I think is the issue is there’s just little variety. You get some snippets of what happened prior to the apocalypse, but volume 1’s just about trying to figure out what the spider’s tendencies are and cooking food. Essentially, the manga’s a little similar to Sweetness & Lightning, then sticks a creature and post-apocalyptic setting to make it all work. It doesn’t really work out. Maybe it gets more interesting as the series goes on, but I’m not interested in finding out.