October 2022 kicked off with another round of excitement over the international hit media franchise SPYxFAMILY. Season 2 of the anime adaptation began airing on October 1st on Netflix, Crunchyroll and other streaming services, properly introducing the long-awaited canine wonder Bond in the first episode.

Meanwhile, on the manga front, Volume 10 of Shueisha's collected tankōbon series covering missions 62 to 66 and short missions 7 and 8 was released in Japan on October 4th. As usual, the promotion machine is in full swing, featuring a flurry of collaborations and ads for the successful franchise.

"Mega Anya" shows up in Shibuya

Since October 3rd, commuters and passers-by in the Shibuya Station area have been surprised to see everyone's favorite mind-reading orphan Anya Forger peering down at them from a giant digital billboard in a video ad promoting the new volume.

What distinguishes the ad from most others, however, is how effectively it uses the unconventionally-shaped digital screen occupying four floors of the Shibuya Scramble Square building overlooking Shibuya Station. Unlike most digital billboard screens which are square or rectangular, this screen is shaped like an asymmetrical wedge or an upside-down V.

As you can see in this video shared by the official Twitter account of manga magazine Shōnen Jump which serializes SPYxFAMILY, we see Loid, Yor, and Anya on a stroll but then, Anya has discovered something and she suddenly approaches. It looks like she has either found an opening in a hedge or a crack in a wall. With her fingers grasping the diagonal edges of the screen, she peers through, as the words しぶや Shibuya appear.

This gives her an idea, and with a devious plotting expression, she thinks to herself ここなら うれる koko nara ureru, meaning "If it's here, it will sell." As a center of youth culture and a neighborhood with numerous bookstores and shops where you can buy manga, Shibuya is indeed the perfect place to promote SPYxFAMILY! The ad ends with the cover and release date of Volume 10.

The Twitter account calls her "Mega Anya," a sobriquet which may have already been circulating after the 3D digital ad for the anime adaptation aired on the Cross Shinjuku Vision screen one week earlier:

As for the ad for the manga, there's also another version, as you can see in a recent post from the franchise’s official Twitter account. In this one, we see Anya in her nightcap, having overslept, then waking up and getting ready to start a new day.

You can see Mega Anya in Shibuya until October 9th, 2022.


By - grape Japan editorial staff.