Post — Aaron Ngo

Major Spoilers are included in this manga review. Please read with caution.

On July 14, 2020, I started and finished Vigilantes’ Volume 6: “A Rational Man”. Written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and drawn by Betten Court, this prequel spin-off series offers a different perspective—the Batman perspective is what I’ll call it—on My Hero Academia’s superpowered society. While Deku and his friends are working hard to become official heroes at school and in real-life hero situations, Koichi “The Crawler”, Pop Step, and Knuckleduster instead choose to moonlight as unlicensed vigilantes.

Volume 6 was spinning its wheels a bit in the first two episodes. The opener with the Feather Hats performance group and Koichi wanting the All-Might hoodie merchandise and the follow-up episode on Makoto Tsukauchi and her police detective brother Naomasa were definitely light-hearted and funny to read, but I was expecting some immediate action after what happened at the end of Volume 5. However, they phased out of the story after these episodes, so Furuhashi might’ve been tying up some loose plot strings before moving into the main story.

The main story actually centered around the main protagonist Koichi and his training to improve his Quirk. In Volume 5, Koichi learned he was able to stick to things and made that a part of his hero intro as The Crawler! In this volume, he mastered an ultimate move.

An ultimate move—called Shooty-Go Blam—that saved Eraser Head from a new rampaging villain. Having characters from the original series like Eraser Head, All Might, and others pop into this spin-off really does help keep my reading focused, but reading Koichi grow and improve was the main highlight of Volume 6. Without Knuckleduster around to guide him, Koichi was finally learning how to be a proper anime protagonist.

The episodes also had a focus on the world-building and the realistic aspect of living in a superpowered society with an unconventional quirk. The scene with Praying Mantis Man—a human who looked like a big mantis—and his complaints about not being able to live in an apartment spoke volumes to the kind of world My Hero Academia occupies.

We were also given some context on the scarred speedster and his potential history with former Pro Hero: O’clock—a character directly based on The Flash according to the author’s design notes. The scarred speedster also had a connection with the Trigger drug being spread throughout the city. The episodes did start picking up on the action after the initial light-hearted start, so all ended up good in the My Hero Academia: Vigilantes’ reading experience.

Let’s talk about Pop Step’s side of the story in this volume. Pop Step teamed up with R-Rated Hero Midnight—another character from the main series—for an undercover operation at a college mixer to investigate potential suspects linked to the trigger drug. Koichi also ended up getting involved—not knowing about the undercover operation—with the college mixer. He was completely oblivious to Pop Step and Midnight’s disguises. This aspect of the story also explored Pop Step’s romantic feelings for Koichi.

Apparently, the two main stories in this volume combined as Eraser Head, the police, and Midnight met up to discuss how the trigger drugs were being used to create even more powerful Instant Villains. However, a hooded figure was already ahead of the game in Hong Kong, wanting answers about the trigger drugs. He attacks quickly like a speedster, hinting at a connection with the scarred speedster, but the face behind the hood was what surprised me most. I’m so ready to dive into Volume 7: “Defend the Tower!”, the latest printed volume.

Thanks for reading my review, everyone! Let’s keep it up!

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