My Hero Academia is still going with the final season coming up later this year to wrap up the epic battle between Shigaraki and Deku. A spin-off series has joined the world of My Hero Academia with a new animated series that just dropped on Crunchyroll. My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is a Japanese manga series written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and illustrated by Betten Court. It is both a spin-off and a prequel to Kōhei Horikoshi’s manga series My Hero Academia.

Koichi Haimawari is a dull college student who aspires to be a hero but has given up on his dream. Although 80% of the world’s population has superhuman powers called Quirks, few are chosen to become heroes and protect people. Everything changes for Koichi when he and Pop☆Step are saved by the vigilante Knuckleduster and get recruited to become vigilantes themselves!

Review

Can’t get enough of the world of My Hero Academia? Now we have a new series for you that takes us out of the classroom and into the streets. My Hero Academia: Vigilantes follows a young college student who admires All Might (sounds familiar) but never went to hero school and never got a license. His quirk isn’t glamorous. One day Koichi is saved alongside another wanna hero, Pop☆Step, by a masked man. At first, Koichi thought he was a hero, but he quickly learned the man, who went by the named Knuckleduster, was not a hero. In fact, he was a vigilante. Vigilantes are unlicensed, and the police don’t like them getting involved in hero work.

Knuckleduster attempts to recruit the two kids, but they are both reluctant to join him, given that his actions are considered illegal. However, as more situations occur that normal heroes are unable to intervene, Koichi starts to see some benefit to the work Vigilantes do. We get some familiar faces in the new series, including a bit of TV personality All Might, but most notably, we see our favorite police officer from the main series, and Eraser Head.

The series touches on aspects of the main series that we didn’t get a ton of time to dive into outside of the classroom setting. Koichi is older and a bit more mature than Izuku was at the start, so you get a lot less whining and build up to him growing a backbone. Instead, you get a bit more adult, darker hero world where the lines between what is right and what is legal begin to blur.

I am enjoying this fresh take on the universe of My Hero Academia and excited to see where things go (I didn’t read ahead). Episodes are dropping weekly on Monday’s on Crunchyroll.