Hello once again, dear readers!
My apologies for there being such a long period between updates, but I haven't exactly been reading a bunch of new manga lately, what with there being so many pre-existing series that keep getting new volumes out all the time.
In retrospect, I could've done Tokyo Ghoul. It's been so long that it's hard to remember what I've started since our last update.
But lately my local library has gotten in Vol. 1 of "My Hero Academia", so I'm going to go with that.
In a world where 80% of the population has superpowers, everyday human child Izuku Midoriya dreams of someday becoming a hero anyway, despite the fact that he possesses no powers.
But, one day, a liquified bad guy accosts Izuku and he is saved by famous Silver Age hero All Might. In his haste to question All Might on the validity of a non-powered person becoming a hero, Izuku inadvertently releases the villain and later winds up on the front lines of the ensuing crisis. All Might appears once again to save the day, but he witnesses Izuku's boldly charging in to save a classmate. This gives the secretly breaking down All Might the proof he needs to select Izuku as his next successor.
The big thing about All Might's power is that it can be passed down, each inheritor growing stronger from the strength of the previous and all those he's saved.
And thus begins our unlikely hero's journey to true heroism.
The story itself is good, the characters so far aren't too bad. Some of the names are weird (Izuku for the main hero, Ochako Uraraka for the heroine. Seriously. Ochako. That isn't even a real name.)
It's like Tiger and Bunny, or X-Men or something, but mixed more with the traditional Japanese school setting.
But what I really liked about My Hero Academia was how it played with the traditional Western superhero and Japanese shonen manga tropes.
For example, in the battle I mentioned above, one would usually expect the main protagonist to somehow unlock some hidden power he'd never even known about and use it to thwart the villain. This does not happen. The mentor character, at the cost of damaging himself, jumps in to save the protagonist after witnessing that he has heroic qualities in him.
Also, Izuku isn’t just GIVEN a special power (which, of course, he can’t control), but he instead earns it, doing hard labor for almost a year in order to ensure that his body and mind are worthy of it. That being said, he doesn’t somehow manage to become a hero through hard work alone, either.
It's very (or at least slightly) unlike what you usually see in comic books, regardless of where they came from geographically, and so I would recommend this series to any of my manga-reading friends.
