Shaenon Garrity | December 4, 2024
Weekly Shonen Jump is the most popular manga magazine in Japan, and the most formulaic. Early in the magazine’s rise to the top, the editors polled schoolchildren on the values they most admired. From their answers, Shonen Jump established its trinity of guiding themes: yuujo, doryoku, shouri – friendship, effort, and victory. Every Shonen Jump title is expected to embody these themes in some way. Tight editorial control and ruthless reliance on reader popularity polls – series that drop to the bottom get dumped – keep creators on the straight and narrow road to manga supremacy. Otoko Zaka, “Manly Hill,” is an old Shonen Jump title by Masami Kurumada that I often think of while watching Jump characters scale some impossible slope as part of their grueling training, but also when Jump artists work themselves into early graves to stay in the lineup.
Friendship/effort/victory has proven to be a winning formula for kids’ manga, but an entire magazine of it threatens to get repetitive, so the most successful Jump creators tend to be those who find their own twists. Sometimes that means introducing an art style that makes the comic stand out visually, like the borderline psychedelic One Piece, the best-selling manga of all time. Sometimes it means picking an unexpected setting for all that bonding and competition, like the ancient art of rakugo performance in Akane-banashi. Death Note rose to the top of the polls with an edgelord-y premise (plus flashy art) and did so well that its antiheroes were allowed to skimp on the “friendship” stuff.
My Hero Academia by Kohei Horikoshi found its niche by working American superhero tropes into manga’s winningest formula. With the series recently wrapping up its hit ten-year-run, this is the perfect time to crack some covers and analyze how the system works.
In a world where 80% of people are born with superpowers, or “quirks,” freckled everyboy hero Izuku Midoriya dreams of becoming a licensed superhero. Problem: he’s one of the quirkless 20%, and you need a power just to get admitted to U.A. High School, where future costumed heroes are trained. Midoriya seems destined to remain a mere fanboy, info-dumping to the crowd whenever a battle breaks out downtown. He especially stans All Might, a hero from America who shouts the names of U.S. cities and states as he fights. Meanwhile, Midoriya gets bullied by the powered kids at school, including the arrogant Katsuki Bakugo, who creates explosions and addresses the other students as supporting characters in his drama. With nothing but optimism on his side, how can Midoriya overcome his dopey uselessness and a social system designed to keep the powerless down? Aren’t you compelled to read on and find out???
Well, then. Things take a turn when Midoriya stumbles on All Might’s secret: his quirk, One for All, allows him to collect power into a burst of super-strength, but channeling it is hard on the body. All Might was injured in battle, and now whenever he’s not actively using his power he turns into a dishrag of a man who looks partly like an even more pathetic version of the “before” guy in the Charles Atlas ads – like a skeleton with Yu-Gi-Oh! hair. But there’s more! One for All can be passed on, “like the Olympic torch,” and All Might is only the latest in a line of heroes who used the power until it wrung them out, then handed it off to a successor. (Just like manga artists training their assistants!)
If Midoriya does enough over-the-top Jump-style training to impress All Might, he can inherit a superpower, enroll in U.A., and begin the even more outrageous training regimen to become a superhero. Can he do it? Well, if he couldn’t, the manga would end immediately instead of running for 40+ volumes and inspiring multiple anime, video games, and spin-off manga, so no spoilers but draw your own conclusions.
My Hero Academia is not one of the Jump manga that makes its mark with grabby art. Most of the main characters have simple, anime-friendly designs and look exactly like whichever shonen manga cliche they embody: the upbeat hero (Midoriya, natch), the hotheaded rival (spiky-haired and snarling Bakugo), the supportive girl-next-door love interest (rosy-cheeked Ochaco Uraraka, whose gravity-manipulation quirk is nifty even if she soon falls behind in the power rankings, the all-too-common fate of a Jump female lead), the brainy guy in glasses (speedster Tenya Ida, who doubles as the requisite aristocratic rich kid).
Horikoshi has fun designing superhero costumes, but even the cleverer quirks tend to be blandly depicted, seldom reaching the heights of visual inventiveness of, say, the body-warping fruit powers in One Piece or the freaky Stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure or the wacky wrestling moves in the ’80s Jump classic Kinnikuman. Every once in a while he draws a goopy, gross quirk with a hint of body horror (Meatball, which allows its user to detach his body parts and toss lumps of flesh around, is a good one), but power blasts and punches, accompanied by speedlines aplenty, are the standard. The fights are expertly drawn but not mind-blowing, and the backgrounds tend to be merely workmanlike even when Horikoshi goes out of his way to establish a setting with visual potential, like a superhero training ground based on Universal Studios Japan (which, probably not coincidentally, has a Shonen Jump licensing deal).
On the other hand, Horikoshi is one of the few manga artists who seems to have some familiarity with American superhero comics, as opposed to just the movie adaptations, and he works that knowledge into his artwork. All Might represents a manga-ka’s attempt at 1990s-ish American superhero art, all blocky muscles and excessive crosshatching. Characters even comment that “he’s drawn in a totally different style!”, although to current American geeks his lacquered blond locks, red-white-and-blue costume, and fixed grin might be more reminiscent of Homelander from The Boys. Even the fan service is American-style, tending toward big boobs and tight costumes rather than the traditional panty shot. (Ochico, assigned her school training uniform: “This suit’s so puffy and curvy. It’s embarrassing…”) The Viz editions of the covers add little vertical boxes with pictures of the characters to the top left corners, like on old Marvel comics.
As he fills the story with superheroes, Horikoshi comes up with a lot of amusing powers and hero names, often rendered in English and written out in katakana, the character set for foreign words. Midoriya’s classmates include Grape Juice, a creepy little guy who grows sticky purple balls all over his body; Earphone Jack, who activates her sound-based powers by plugging her long earlobes into things; and Can’t Stop Twinkling and his suggestively-positioned navel laser. The adult heroes and villains tend to have more polish, but they can still get pretty weird, like the fashion-conscious Best Jeanist, who controls fabric, or the school principal who’s just a squirrel-like critter in a suit and tie.
The “school for kids with powers” premise may suggest X-Men to American superhero fans, but in that respect My Hero Academia seems to take its cue from another Western media franchise, the Harry Potter series – or, maybe more directly, from previous manga series that lifted from Harry Potter, like Masashi Kishimoto’s mega-hit Naruto. Naruto drifted away from the academic angle in favor of no-holds-barred ninja battles fairly early in its run (though I always liked the mini-arc in which the characters take a written test in an ordinary classroom, only to realize they’re really being tested on their ability to use ninjutsu to cheat), but MHA keeps up the formulaic school storylines even as the stakes grow higher. All Might joins the staff of U.A. as a teacher so he can play the Dumbledore role, guiding and advising his favorite student.
After the first couple of volumes, an ebb-and-flow of tension develops. The kids troop off to a superhero version of some familiar high-school milieu like a summer camp or an athletics festival, are menaced by the evil League of Villains and its latest slate of super-foes, risk their lives to take down the bad guys, heal, and move on to the next assignment. Midoriya keeps making friends and turning rivals into allies until Horikoshi is able to fill two-page spreads with smiling faces and secure the Friendship wedge of Jump’s Manga Triforce. As the cast expands, there’s a character for every reader to latch onto, a time-tested trick to building a successful tournament manga. (Mine is Froppy, an affably dorky girl with frog-themed powers who, we learn, comes from an entire family of frog people. Not everybody gets the cool quirks.)
Throughout all the action and dramedy, the manga periodically flirts with acknowledging that the superhero world is … kind of messed up. The school nurse’s healing powers can’t fix every bone-cracking battle – some school-sanctioned, some not – that the teenage trainee heroes get into. Fairly early on, Midoriya blows out his arm using One for All and, like an injured high-school athlete, is faced with the prospect of his career ending before it’s even begun. He keeps pushing himself beyond the limit anyway, of course, since you can’t have a Jump manga without Effort. He just starts kicking instead of punching.
There are other disturbing undercurrents. Shoto Todoroki, the “cool, aloof rival” of the core cast, is essentially a eugenics experiment, the son of two powerful heroes who were forced into marriage to produce superior offspring. He inherited both his parents’ powers but vows to use only his mother’s ice powers, despising his abusive father and the fire powers he successfully passed along. Many members of the League of Villains are driven by cynicism or outrage toward the privileges that the powered enjoy at the expense of the powerless (or less-powered; there’s not much someone with a frog tongue or a dog head can do against a guy who controls fire and ice, after all). The League argues that the public trusts too blindly in its heroes and the system that covers up their dark side, and it’s hard not to agree that they have a point. If Midoriya lost his borrowed power, would the society that currently lionizes him turn its back on him again? (SPOILERS: According to the manga’s surprisingly ambivalent ending, yes.)
MHA touches on these issues but, again and again, backs off; Horikoshi is a canny enough writer to be aware of the moral complexities his world building introduces, but also a canny enough entertainer to know that his readers come for biff-pow action and affirmations like, “The people in this world who can smile are always the strongest.” The heroes with traumatic or exploitative origins rise above them. The villains go too far, even if their gripes are legitimate, and must be brought to justice. The system works, more or less, and it’s not like the villains offer an alternative beyond open tyranny and chaos.
The self-sacrificing power of One for All meets its logical match in the uber-villain and final boss of the League, All for One, whose power is the ability to steal other people’s powers, and who, instead of passing his ability on to an acolyte, possesses the acolyte’s body. Boiling the conflict down to power used for public service versus power used for tyranny, Horikoshi cuts to the core of the superhero concept more succinctly than most American superhero writers. The battles build up to the simply but effectively named Final War, all the heroes versus all the villains, which in true Jump fashion stretches on for volume after volume.
The just-dropped final chapter of MHA has gotten flack from fans; it’s also one of the manga’s occasional, furtive stabs at defying expectations. Without getting into too much detail, Midoriya gets Victory, but he doesn’t get a victory lap. For Midoriya, the character, who chooses heroism because he’s heroic, the reward isn’t the point. But for the readers rooting for him, it kind of is. Older Jump series could get away with semi-downer endings (Saint Seiya has a classic one), but when you provide decisive friendship and decisive effort, fans expect, in the end, decisive victory.
Personally, I’ve got a soft spot for the ending of My Hero Academia, maybe because I’m in the comics industry, where victory is elusive and not to be trusted. If you get your roses, that’s nice, of course. But it’s just nice. Win or lose, you’re going to get up the next day and do it all over again, and the things you can count on are the work you do and the people at your side.
English (US) · 