One Piece Creator Reveals His Pokemon Bond with My Hero Academia Artist

Pokemon Go, at the height of its popularity, united Poke-fans and newcomers alike in their desire to become real life Pokemon trainers, swapping pocket monsters and attempting to grab the best and brightest in their town. Little did we realize that the mobile augmented reality game was bringing together not only regular folks around the world, but two of the biggest mangakas currently creating in the medium. Eiichiro Oda revealed that he was currently trading some shiny Pokemon with the artist behind the world of UA Academy, My Hero Academia’s Kohei Horikoshi.

One Piece has had some of its best months in recent memory, thanks in part not only to the fourteenth film, Stampede, but also the white hot story arc that is running through both the anime and manga with the Wano Country Arc. While My Hero Academia can say the same with the recent release of its second feature length film, Heroes Rising, and its fourth season of the anime wherein Midoriya and company fight against the villainous Overhaul, a recent controversy is looking to put a monkey wrench into their works as China has currently banned the series.

Twitter User JoOnBulba commented on the hilarious and adorable relationship between Eiichiro Oda and Kohei Horikoshi that was spawned from Pokemon Go, as the two are trading some of the more rare pocket monsters with one another over their mobile devices:

While we aren’t sure if we’ll ever see a proper crossover between One Piece and My Hero Academia, the two properties did meet one another in the Bandai Namco video game event that was Jump Force. With characters like Luffy, Midoriya, Bakugo, Zoro, and several others showing up to be a part of the universal shattering event, we’ll be crossing our fingers that these two franchises meet once again either via a Shonen event or with a crossover of their own!

What do you think of the mutual love that Oda and Horikoshi share for Pokemon Go! Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, UA Academy, and the Grand Line!

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 90 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold.