One Piece Creator Has My Hero Academia Fans Emotional Over This Tribute

Sometimes, anime crossovers can be created in the most touching and heartfelt ways. Such is the case with the creator of the legendary pirate franchise of One Piece paying homage to a past artistic work of My Hero Academia creator, Kohei Horikoshi. It just so turns out that Horikoshi was a big fan of One Piece in his past, sending off a piece of fan art that showed just how talented the future mangaka was at the time and the bright future he had creating the world of Midoriya, Shigaraki, and the rest of the ensemble that populate the world of UA Academy!

Twitter User JoyBoyTheories shared the heartfelt reference that Eiichiro Oda shared, recollecting when Horikoshi submitted his fan art to the “Usop’s Pirate Gallery”, long before the days when he would be drawing the students of Class 1-A squaring off against the League of Villains or the Yakuza:

While One Piece and My Hero Academia haven’t met officially in an anime crossover, One Piece has met plenty of other Shonen series along the way and has crossed over with several of the Class 1-A heroes and villains in the video game Jump Force.

What do you think of this touching flashback that crosses over My Hero Academia and One Piece? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, UA Academy, and the Straw Hat Pirates!

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 also launched its second big movie, Heroes Rising, in Japan this month.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.