Trivia / Arachnid

• Creator Couple: The Watamote parody omake about Geji is drawn by Murata's wife Sato (Fragtime, Living Dead!), who also wrote the omake about a young Dinoponera in volume 11. They married around the time Geji was introduced in the series, and Murata, who seemed really into Watamote at the time, made the character share her anniversary date with Sato.
• Inspiration for the Work: While responding to a fan on Twitter about how he likes Captain America and Spider-Man, Murata mentioned the Spider-Man fancomic he once drew and noted that Arachnid is a work that couldn't have existed without Marvel's web slinging hero.
• Invisible Advertising: Arachnid stands out as one of the Gangan JOKER series that have been there since the beginning but never got a cover page on the magazine (only Blattodea got one for its launch), an anime adaptation or much advertising in general. Even the official English translation for the Manga UP! app in 2022 just quietly popped up in there.
• Late Export for You: Arachnid was only available outside of Japan since 2009 in a few asian countries, and in the West it only got published at France by Soleil. An official English translation only appeared in July 2022 for the online Manga UP! app, which notoriously has censored pages in both the Japanese and Global versions.
• Rule 34 – Creator Reactions: Murata once reviewed Orc Strike I and II, two doujin porn games that had Gokiburi and then Alice in them. He unsurprisingly took them in stride, finding Alice reciting pi to cope with being raped to be Actually Pretty Funny. He also retweeted two hentai fancomics of Caterpillar that got published at Comiket and went on to create a borderline hentai spinoff of Killing Bites which jokes about other series that placed R34 bans upon their fans.
• Schedule Slip: The Blattodea sequel was originally teased in a Choubu no Shinobi volume released on December 2018 with a 2019 tentative release date, but on November 2019 it was confirmed on the final Choubu volume that it will begin in January 2020 instead.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Arachnid started out as a 2001 one-shot named Turis, which is available on the author's website. It matches volume 1 of Arachnid, with Kumo and a not bald Suzumebachi present, but it is a side-story to Jackals. No biology lectures about bugs, either. Turis was introduced as a side antagonist in Jackals four years later, but her backstory was never shown in that story.
  • The second set of sketches is much closer to the final version. Chapter 5 from this proto-volume 1 wasn't made publicly available on that site, but is on the author's Pixiv page behind a paywall.
  • Chapter 18 cuts off as Kuramoto is about to get gangraped by a bunch of delinquents. The author wrote in his blog at the time that he did sketch a few pages for the rape scene that were rejected by the editor, and ultimately he felt like it was best left to the reader's imagination anyway. Ironically, when there was a short follow-up to the scene in a flashback later, it turned out Kuramoto was actually in control of the orgy and brainwashing all the boys.
  • The later chapter sketches published on Pixiv Fanbox have no major changes in the chapters themselves, including the aforementioned chapter 18, but there are different versions of chapter covers and some artwork such as one that shows Sasori was envisioned with a messier hairstyle than she has in the story proper. One of the volumes includes a Hanakamakiri sketch even though he never appears in the story, and another includes a Dinoponera sketch that conspicuously specifies her, and only her, sex with a ♀ as if implying she had a male counterpart at some point.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: In one volume afterword, Murata jokes about Kabutomushi's introduction and motivations adding an element of Fridge Logic to the story — Kumo hired her to take care of Alice so that it doesn't look like he abandoned Alice to fight off the Organization alone, but then Kabutomushi took a long time to meet Alice for no explained reason despite taking the task seriously. He handwaves it as rhino beetles having "nocturnal habits". It is also hard to tell if the identity of the Boss was planned out from the beginning, as one Once More, with Clarity flashback has the characters involved with reversed dialogue in a way that doesn't make sense in hindsight. Kabutomushi eventually killing the Boss did have long-term foreshadowing, though. In a 2021 interview, he admitted to writing the sequel Blattodea on a chapter-by-chapter basis.