Over ten years before Tatsuya Endo created Spy x Family, his first serialised manga was Tista, and the first volume has now been published in English. It’s set in New York City, where an assassin known as Sister Militia, has been evading the police for years. Her skill is extraordinary, taking shots from extremely far distances, and her targets seem to be bad people. The police have no idea that her real name is Tista Rockwell, and when she’s not assassinating people for a church, she’s going to school in the hopes to one day become a teacher.

The main reason I picked this book up was because it was by Endo, and I love Spy x Family. I’m sure many others will pick it up for the same reason. This is a very different story. It’s a lot darker tonally and there’s not as much humour. Still it’s a very good first volume that had me hooked pretty quickly. The first chapter takes a little while to get going, but by chapter two I was invested and wanted to know what happened next. After making a new friend, who just so happens to be connected to her next target, Tista ends up questioning her own life and what’s going on around her.

As the first volume unfolds the story keeps quite a slow pace. The art is fantastic, but for a lot of the volume there’s not much happening. The series only ran for two volumes, with the second one due out in July in English, and with how slow paced the first volume is, it seems hard to believe the story will be completely wrapped up in the second volume. I’ll be cautiously excited to read it when it comes out.

Thanks for reading!