Hello anime fans and manga-curious readers! Welcome to IGN's Manga Guide where we'll take you through a legendary or beloved manga series and everything you need to know before you embark on it. We'll be launching with one of the biggest manga of recent years, Kōhei Horikoshi's action-packed superhero smash My Hero Academia. The series first debuted in 2014 and is still serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump. It follows a series of students at a school for kids with powers known within that universe as "Quirks." The manga has already been adapted into a popular ongoing anime series running for six seasons — with MHA season 7 now in prgress — as well as three animated spinoffs . So whether those brought you here or you're just excited to dive into the popular manga, then let's get ready and dive in.
Where to Read My Hero Academia Online
If you want to catch up with the epic action adventure of My Hero Academia then you can read the first few chapters online at one of the best free manga sites, Viz.com. If you get caught up on those freebies and want to read the rest then you can sign up to the Shonen Jump app which currently has a seven day free trial before you begin your subscription which only costs $2.99 a month for all the manga you could want including every single chapter of My Hero Academia. There is also of course great library services like Libby which currently offers volumes of My Hero Academia for readers who have library cards and download the Libby app to their devices.
Where to Buy My Hero Academia Manga Sets
Includes 20 volumes. My Hero Academia Box Set
Also includes bonus illustrations and a poster.
If you prefer to hold a physical book in your hand or you're a collector of manga, then you're in luck because My Hero Academia is so popular you can find it at any major bookstore and even some big box stores like Target. Barnes & Noble will likely always have a copy on hand and you can of course order them online from Amazon. And if you're really excited and want to get the first 20 volumes you can shell out on the epic box set featured above.
How Many Volumes of My Hero Academia Are There?
There are currently 40 tankobon volumes of My Hero Academia available — which are the digest sized books that you can buy from Viz — but there are still chapters to be serialized. The main series has had eight new chapters this year that have yet to be collected. There are also the many spinoff series that My Hero Academia has spawned. My Hero Academia: Smash!! has five volumes, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes encompasses 15, and My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions is up to six volumes as of April this year. So basically there's a lot of My Hero Academia to dig into if you decide that this is the manga series for you.
What's My Hero Academia About?
In a world where the majority of people have superpowers, Izuku Midoriya is a Quirkless boy who dreams of attending U.A. High School, the premier Hero Academy. co*cky class bully Katsuki Bakugo teases the Hero-obsessed Izuku about his U.A. application, telling his powerless classmate that he'll never get in. However, fate has other plans for Izuku that day. A chance encounter with his idol, All Might, ends with Izuku selflessly attempting to save Bakugo from a supervillain. All Might, secretly sick after years of action, decides that the noble Izuku shall be his successor and receive his powerful Quirk, One For All.
Izuku and Bakugo are both accepted into U.A. High School and so begins their journey together as they meet all manner of colorful characters including Shoto Todoroki, Ochaco Uraraka, Eijiro Kirishima, Denki Kaminari, Tsuyu Asui, and Tenya Iida. Together the teens go on a series of wild adventures as they train to become heroes. But what are they fighting? Well, the opposite of the One For All power is (wait for it) All For One, which is the primary source of conflict in the story along with the antagonistic force known as the League of Villains.
Likely due to the massive success of the manga, the anime adaptation is one of the most faithful of recent years. While some small shifts are made in timelines to make the story smoother, anime fans will likely be surprised by just how closely the series adapts the original manga and how well the best MHA characters are represented.
History and Impact
It's hard to understate the impact that Kōhei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia has had on the current popularity of manga and anime. But it came after the cancellation of his previous series which was axed before it even hit three volumes. Building on his love of American superhero comics like Spider-Man and the X-Men, he came up with a short story My Hero that was published in Akamaru Jump. It was from there that the fantastical world of My Hero Academia was built, quickly becoming the pop-cultural powerhouse that it is today.
The first volume was published in Japan in November 2014 before being released in English in 2015. By the time the third volume was out there were a million copies of the books in circulation and the book was ranking on bestseller charts. By the time the anime adaptation began, the series had 5.8 million books in circulation. Now it's hit 40 volumes with over 100 million books in circulation. The anime helped to transform the series from a manga success story to a global phenomenon and you can find My Hero Academia merch everywhere from Target to Hot Topic. It was also arguably one of the series that helped propel the contemporary understanding and love of manga to the mainstream.
My Hero Academia has also inspired three feature length movies which have cumulatively taken over $100 million at the US box office, with the most recent film My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission making almost half of that massive cume with a huge $47 million in the US.
The question of when the series will come to an end has been on fans' minds since December 2021 when Horikoshi spoke of the series being in its endgame. Since then there's been a lot of discussion as to when it'll actually finish but it seems likely 2024 will be the year when the original manga series finally comes to a close, though its impact and legacy will live on.
Rosie Knight is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything from anime to comic books to kaiju to kids movies to horror flicks. She has over half a decade of experience in entertainment journalism with bylines at Nerdist, Den of Geek, Polygon, and more. Rosie is a published comics author who has written titles including Godzilla Rivals vs. Battra and The Haunted High-Tops. She co-hosts the weekly Crooked Media pop-culture podcast X-Ray Vision. When she's not writing, you can find her playing Dragon Ball FighterZ or rewatching weird old horror and martial movies in her free time. She loves making comics and zines as well as collecting VHS and reading much manga as humanly possible. You can find her on social at @rosiemarx.
