My Hero Academia has taken the anime world by storm, and fans are always itching for more. But it turns out there’s been more available all along!
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Before starting his work on My Hero Academia, Horikoshi wrote a simple story about a boy fighting aliens:
Before the insanity of MY HERO ACADEMIA, Kohei Horikoshi created this wonderful intergalactic tale about a boy thrust into a world where he has to be the prince and save his planet.
Check it out and find out more about Horikoshi’s past works!
LINK: https://t.co/MbG6XwhxBd pic.twitter.com/RX3fv7F33f
— YonkouProductions (@YonkouProd) December 5, 2017
Horikoshi’s first manga is titled Barrage, and follows the story of a boy named Astro. Astro is a kid from the slums living on the planet Industria. After meeting Industria’s prince, who looks and sounds exactly like him, he ends up getting wrapped into a situation where he’s the Prince of Industria and has to defend the planet from alien menaces with the help of a mechanical and mystical weapon known as the “Org.”
Horikoshi’s Barage may have gone unnoticed largely because it was released as a quick One-Shot story in Shuiesha’s Weekly Shonen Jump. Running for 16 chapters and collected in to two volumes (and licensed by Viz Media for an English release) from May to September 2012, Barrage came and went fairly quickly. One-Shot stories are often released in Shonen Jump as a way for editor’s to test popularity, and for manga authors to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Often these stories act as sort of a “pilot” of a series, if they get picked up for a longer run later.
Interested fans would not how many similarities this one-shot shares with Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia. The same kind of quirky character design, slickly drawn action scenes, and loveable characters are what made My Hero Academia so popular years later.
For those unfamiliar with My Hero Academia, the series 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 15 volumes so far, and has been licensed by Viz Media for an English language release since 2015.
Interested in Horikoshi’s first manga? Talk to me @Valdezology.
