A "doe-eyed" young Steve Jobs makes his debut as a manga hero in a new biography out in Japan in this week.

The first instalment of award-winning author Mari Yamazaki's manga biography of Jobs – based on Walter Isaacson's bestselling life of the late Apple chief executive – hit newsstands in Japan this week in the April issue of the young women's comic anthology Kiss. It starts with Jobs as an adult, asking Isaacson to tell his story . Here, Jobs is drawn fairly realistically, sporting his habitual black poloneck, in what Tokyo-based reviewer Sam Byford, in a positive write-up in The Verge, called "a semi-realistic monochrome style that is never off-putting, but stays true to the Japanese manga tradition".

The cover of the first in Kiss magazine's serialised biography. Illustration: Kiss Magazine

"'So Walter'. 'Yes?' While we were walking, he made me an unexpected offer. 'Would you write my biography?' 'Your biography??' 'That's right'," writes Yamazaki, in an extract shown online. "'So this is the reason why I came to Colorado to meet your wife and kids'. 'Yep'. 'I think I would make an interesting subject'."

Later, though, Jobs becomes a more classic manga hero, "rendered as a cute, doe-eyed kid who worries about whether his adoptive parents love him", writes Byford, and "once Jobs is of college age, Yamazaki swiftly transforms him into the type of character any teenage reader could fall in love with".

Byford points out that the instalment is appearing in Kiss magazine, alongside "regular tales of high-school love and drama, and that's the lens through which readers will view it". It ends as Jobs meets Steve Wozniak, the man with whom he would go on to found Apple, with further chapters to follow. Yamazaki is best known for the bestselling manga Thermae Romae.

Isaacson's authorised biography of Jobs was published in 2011, less than three weeks after Jobs's death, and became an instant bestseller, shifting more than 37,000 copies in its first five days on sale and garnering positive reviews. It's "studded with moments that make you go 'wow'," wrote Sam Leith in the Guardian.