My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is now working its way through its anime as part of the Spring 2025 anime schedule, and the newest episode of the series has debuted its own take on the X-Men’s Cyclops and Wolverine. My Hero Academia and Marvel pretty much go hand in hand as Kohei Horikoshi’s original manga franchise has a lot of callbacks and connections to famous Marvel superheroes, and things got even more connected with with some characters being outright parallels to some of those heroes. This goes even further with the official spinoff series which takes place years before the events of the main series.
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My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is continuing through its anime run with a new episode, and it has taken things further with these Marvel parallels with two new characters who are outright full My Hero Academia versions of Cyclops and Wolverine. Not only do the two of them visually resemble the two famous X-Men characters, but they also have very similar powers as well that they show off when fighting one another in the latest episode too. So they really are a new version of Cyclops and Wolverine just in this new universe.
My Hero Academia Debuts Its Own X-Men
My Hero Academia: Vigilantes sees Koichi, Knuckleduster and Pop Step kick off their journey as a trio of illegal heroes taking on criminals in the streets, and the first major job is a pair of students fighting one another. They come from rival middle schools, and are using their respective quirks in an alley. There’s a shorter one that resembles Wolverine (complete with an “X” belt buckle) who summons blades from his hands, and a taller one (with a blue and yellow armband) that has a visor that gives him a laser beam blast much like Cyclops.
These two characters in particular were two that My Hero Academia: Vigilantes fans had been waiting to see animated. There was some concern about how they would be portrayed in the new anime, however, because they are so close to their Marvel counterparts. It’s not just an inspiration for their abilities, or design, but it’s an outright callback to Wolverine and Cyclops down to the fact that they don’t really like one another even with this first debut. But what ultimately gets them to settle their differences is Pop Step, who the two end up being big fans of.
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What’s Next for My Hero Academia’s Own X-Men?
Hilariously, it was also very important to have these characters maintain their callbacks to Marvel’s heroes as they are going to play a big role in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes moving forward. What makes this series much different than My Hero Academia is the fact that Koichi and the illegal trio are much closer to the people they help in their neighborhood, and it starts out with characters like this Cyclops and Wolverine duo. They need to be the same as they were in the manga because they make quite a few appearances (and even show up in the opening theme).
This also bodes well for some of the other big parallels and characters that will appear in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes‘ future. There are some even more notable callbacks that will show up in the coming episodes as Koichi and the others take on even more dangerous situations, and that kicks off a whole new wave of fun that fans will get to see as the anime continues through the rest of the Spring 2025 anime season.
