My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is finally coming to the silver screen. Fans of the superhero shonen series have wait since 2018 to see if the story of Crawler, Pop Step, and Knuckle Duster would be animated and this April, those same fans are getting their wish. Studio BONES is diving into the spin-off series months before the eighth and final season of the main series, promising to show us the heroes that operate outside of the law. In the early chapters of the manga, Marvel’s X-Men didn’t just cameo in the side story but had major roles too boot.
Videos by ComicBook.com
In the earliest chapters of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes’ manga, we are introduced to two delinquent high schoolers named Ichimoku Samatsu and Jube Namimaru. While they don’t exactly look like Scott Summers and James Howlett, the two criminals in the making have Quirks that make them look quite like Cyclops and Wolverine. With the anime’s arrival on the horizon, now seems like the perfect time to not only revisit this unexpected Marvel crossover but to also begin speculating whether the pair will actually make their way to the television series. Ichimoku does have the ability to shoot energy beams from his eyes, but Jube doesn’t have Logan’s legendary adamantium claws, instead holding onto two wooden swords.
[RELATED: My Hero Academia: Vigilantes Goes Back To The Past With New Prequel Preview]
Uncanny Vigilantes
In the first volume of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes’ manga, artist Betten Court broke down the mutants’ inspiration on these anime characters, “Furuhashi instructed me to make them look like delinquents. Samatsu’s visor was inspired by a certain Marvel superhero. Namimaru (whose name comes from a certain group) just gets rounder and rounder the more I draw him.”
Writer Hideyuki Furuhashi went into even more detail on the pair, confirming that Ichimoku and Jube were one hundred percent meant to pay homage to Cyclops and Wolverine, “Two certain someones from X-Men, yes. At first I was just going to use them for the start of chapter three, thinking ‘I’ll barely get away with this level of parody, so this time only…’ But then they kept showing up in chapters four and five, so my editor said, ‘These guys again huh?’ They’ll probably end up as regulars in the bonus pages of the volumes. I like them because they’re just so easy to employ however I want.”
Past Class 1-A Marvel Interactions
The biggest meeting of the anime universe with the Marvel universe was in Deadpool: Samurai in which everyone’s favorite Merc With a Mouth teamed up with All Might to take on Thanos the Mad Titan. As of the writing of this article, an anime adaptation for this Wade Wilson manga hasn’t been confirmed and the manga itself is on hiatus. Hopefully, comic fans will one day see a full blown crossover that will slam the two universes together as a fight between Class 1-A and Marvel’s finest is one that would be well worth checking out.
Want to see if Charles Xavier’s students make the cut for the upcoming anime? Follow along with Team Anime on ComicBook.com for the latest updates on the Vigilantes and hit me up directly @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime.
