I love these darn kids.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is slowly becoming super cool. At first I was bothered by the slight change in tone and the emphasis put on female sexuality (and there still is), but as the story has gone on I think it’s finally finding it’s groove. It helps a lot, to me at least, that the author is starting to integrate characters from the main My Hero Academia story into this. In volume 5 we get cameos from Eraserhead, Midnight and Fatgum, and all of those cameos made me perk up with excitement. Their characters do not take over the story or even drive it, they’re just background material, and that’s exactly how they should be used.

The main arc of this volume is that The Crawler and Pop Step are on the way to an idol performance when they run into Fatgum and subsequently help him solve a crime and track down a villain. There’s other shenanigans as usual but it’s fun. Knuckleduster is staying away from the others for the time being as his daughter was being possessed by Kuin Hachisuka, the Queen Bee. His daughter is in the hospital recovering and because of this, Knuckleduster really doesn’t make much of an impact in this volume. This volume seems much more like filler, but it’s still enjoyable.

My Hero Academia: School Briefs Volume 2 continues from the manga, adding in little side stories of larger scenes we saw play out for plot earlier. I find these collections to be adorable, and I like getting a bit of insight into the characters outside of the usual manga realm. In the manga and show, everything is focused on Midoriya, which is understandable, but it’s nice to have some backstory on some of the other characters like Momo and Jiro. We get some insight into Momo’s home life, Jiro’s feelings about the people around her, what Kirishima and Bakugo get up to in their time off, and a super cute sleepover chapter with the girls from class A and B. The only thing that drags this down is Mineta, per usual. Who would have guessed? But these little additions to the canon are unoffensive and silly, and just add more to the lore and world-building of the MHA universe, so I’m all for it.

Title: MHA Vigilantes Volume 5 // MHA School Briefs 2
Author: Kohei Horikoshi
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192 // 224
ISBN:  9781974707720 // 9781421582719

Three Descriptors: Fun, Quick, character driven