‘My Hero Academia’ Reveals Gorgeous New Volume Cover

My Hero Academia fans often love when each new manga of the series is released because of the fantastic new covers each one gets. The latest for Volume 20 is definitely the most impressive so far includes major homages to Hollywood films.

Collecting together the climactic fight between Midoriya and Gentle during the Culture Festival, the cover for Volume 20 is a visual marvel alluding to films like Star Wars in its epic scale.

As Midoriya raises his hand to the sky to use a variation of his One For All power, the pose he takes mirrors the original Star Wars film poster with Luke Skywalker reaching into the sky with his Lightsaber. This dramatic theatrical feel overall for the cover is all too appropriate for the Culture Festival arc, which features some of its most theatrical villains as well.

Volume 20 deals with Midoriya’s fight with Gentle, who had attempted to disrupt the Culture Festival but Midoriya wasn’t having it. This is reflected by how prominently Gentle and his assistant La Brava are on the cover, and their almost frightened pose hints at the greater identity struggle the two face as they battle Midoriya.

Along with Gentle and La Brava (with the pro-hero Hound Dog toward the bottom right), on the opposite side representing the main arc of the Culture Festival, is Eri and Mirio. The two of them hold a special significance in this arc, as Eri is invited to the festival by Mirio and Midoriya in an effort to cheer her up after the events of the Internship arc. The goal of the Culture Festival was to get her to smile, so seeing her on the cover so prominently is a good thing.

Finally, there’s Jirou along with some of the dancing members of Class 1-A Uraraka, Tsuyu, and Ojiro, who have a huge performance at the festival during the end of the arc. The only way to properly capture all of these strong elements was with such a strong cover in return.

My Hero Academia was created by Kohei Horikoshi and has been running in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump since July 2014. The story follows Izuku Midoriya, who lives in a world where everyone has super powers but he was born without them. Dreaming to become a superhero anyway, he’s eventually scouted by the world’s best hero All Might and enrolls in a school for professional heroes. The series has been collected into 19 volumes so far, and has been licensed by Viz Media for an English language release since 2015.