My Hero Academia Creator Shares First-Look at Kid Aizawa

The latest chapter of My Hero Academia have been digging into the true origin of the Nomu monsters used by the League of Villains. That history has unexpectedly collided with the past of Shota Aizawa / Eraser Head, and his time as a U.A. High School student (before becoming the instructor we now know and love). With My Hero Academia delving into Aizawa’s younger years, fans are getting the inevitable boon of being able to see the character design for “Kid Aizawa,” make its official debut! Now, we have a new My Hero Academia promo image which gives us our best look yet at what kid Aizawa is all about!

As you can see above, we now have three distinct character designs corresponding to three distinct eras in Shota Aizawa’s life:

• Child Aizawa – Young Shota look just as skeptical and unaffected as he eventually would as a n adult.
• Student Aizawa – Shota during his school years at U.A. is a delicious reversal of his current role as teacher/mentor. His body pose speaks of teen angst, which is also a nice change to Shota stoic demeanour as an adult.
• Teacher Aizawa – we all know and love the adult version of Eraser Head; now we can truly see how long of a journey it was for him to become that man.

If you haven’t been reading, the My Hero Academia manga is building up to its first big war. A major subplot of that “Meta Liberation War” arc is the history of the Nomu, and the dark reveal that All For One’s longtime henchman Dr. Ujiko has even raided corpses to steal quirk powers and cadavers to use in creating his Nomu beasts. One of the biggest reveals of that Nomu origin story is the story of Shota Aizawa’s childhood friend Oboro Shirakumo, who died battling a villain during their Hero Work-Study. Dr. Ujiko apparently stole Oboro Shirakumo’s corpse and used it to create Kurogiri, the League of Villains’ teleporting second-in-command, Kurogiri. Naturally, the new that Kurogiri is actually Oboro has messed up the dead boy’s two best friends (Eraser Head and Present Mic) pretty bad.

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 month.