Volume 3 of My Hero Academia covers issues 18-26.

This volume picks up with the arrival of All Might to the USJ to bring down the League of Villains. Tenya Iida made good on his promise to save his classmates and informed All Might of the trouble at the USJ before running on to gather up the other teachers back at UA. At the USJ, All Might battles the League of Villains but especially Nomu, the bioengineered, nearly unstoppable creature with more quirks than can be controlled. It takes nearly everything All Might has to stop and defeat the Nomu, nearly exposing his secret to the students in the process but is able to gather himself up and win just in the nick of time. The other teachers also finally arrive and thankfully thwart Midoriya’s plan to sacrifice himself in order to help All Might defeat the bad guys. Once the other teachers arrive Shigaraki and the other villains retreat nearly immediately and the children try to deal with what they’ve been through.

The other arc that begins in this volume is the introduction of the UA sports festival, an event on par with the Olympics in terms of popularity in Japan. Here Midoriya and the other students will battle kids from outside of their class, including those hoping to move from general studies into the hero course that 1A is a part of. This arc is one of my absolute favorites in the entire series of My Hero Academia. Not only are there actual stakes involved as the kids are not only battling one another for skill and glory, but pro heroes are watching and basing many of their sidekick and internship choices off of the performances during the festival. There’s fantastic bits of character fun here, from Aizawa and my other favorite teacher, Present Mic, doing the commentary for the entire festival in an odd couple style, to the debut of several new characters. Here we meet Monoma from class 1-B who hates class 1-A with a passion and Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu, the best named character in the entire series and awesome counterpart to Kirishima. The students must again face giant robots and a full obstacle style course for the first round, and our sweet main character ends up in 1st place due to some real ingenuity, but also carries a huge target on his back as the next round is a cavalry battle where students must steal one another’s numbers and Midoriya is worth a whopping 1 million.

This volume is awesome and I love it. Volumes 3 and 4 are easily two of my favorites in the overall 15 I have read so far. I’m a sucker for characterization and these two are pretty heavy with showing us the true nature of so many of the heroes in training.

Also of note:
This volume of the manga begins with episode 12 of Season 1 and concludes with episode 3 of Season 2.

Title: My Hero Academia (Volume 3)
Author: Kohei Horikoshi
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 978-1421585109