My Hero Academia Creator Celebrates New Jiro Figure with Cute Sketch

My Hero Academia‘s currently having one of its biggest years yet with a new season of the anime, new movie, and more manga spin-offs being released by the moment. This means new merchandise as well, and now even more fan-favorites from the series are getting the spotlight beyond expected characters like Midoriya and Bakugo. Kyoka Jiro recently got a new collectible figure in her honor, and series creator Kohei Horikoshi was excited to see this as well. Seeing her new figure hit the shelves in Japan, Horikoshi commemorated the occasion with a new sketch.

Sharing the cute sketch to Twitter, Kohei Horikoshi celebrated the release of a new 1/8 scale figure for Jiro with a few special photos along with the following comment, “So Jirou’s figure is currently on sale! She looks so distinguished! Yay~!”

Jiro’s figure is not the only recent release that Horikoshi has celebrated with a new sketch as he previously shared fun takes on fan-favorites Himiko Toga and Ochaco Uraraka as well. Seeing the character merchandise for the series slowly expand beyond the main character offerings is not only a good argument for how popular the series has become over the five yeas of its tenure, but that each of the characters has a design strong enough to make the transition to cool collectible figures.

Kyoka Jiro has returned along with the rest of Class 1-A in My Hero Academia‘s fourth season. Now that each of them has earned their provisional hero licenses, the next phase of their hero training will involved each of them going out into the world for fuller work studies than before. Although each of them has had some experience with their prior internships, things are going to be different now that there are no boundaries as to how much they can involve themselves in the actual hero work.

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 powers, even though 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 licensed by Viz Media for an English language release since 2015. My Hero Academia will also be launching its second big movie, Heroes Rising, in Japan this December.