I’ll admit, to my shame, that I’d dismissed My Hero Academia: Vigilantes as a manga originally as something of a nothingburger side story that wasn’t worth paying attention to. This was a mistake. Instead, MHA: Vigilantes serves as a well executed prologue to the core story, giving us a chance once again to see characters we haven’t seen for a while, plus meeting a new cast.

As the title suggests, MHA: Vigilantes follows a group of unlicensed heroes – a general helpful person with gliding powers, Koichi Haimawari (Nice Guy/The CrullerCrawler) serves as our audience perspective character, joined by street idol Kazuho Haneyama (Pop?Step), and their mentor Iwao Oguro (Knuckleduster). They start out dealing with street punks who harass people, but end up getting caught up in a plan involving a sort of quirk-boosting steroid being distributed by an agent of All For One, Queen Bee.

What makes this show really sing is that the main My Hero Academia series is very much all caught up in what’s going on at UA High, meaning that a lot of what’s going on with the general public is missed. Here we get a real sense of what this Superhuman Society really is. Yes, it’s a lot like modern Japan, except with superheroes working for talent agencies the same way actors and idols do, but having a way to confirm that is nice, and something the show itself is generally missing.

This also leads to some fun chemistry with the cast. All of these characters are people with day jobs unrelated to heroing, which means that, unlike MHA, we get to actually do things with characters having to juggle heroing and their ordinary lives. We still have fights with villains, but it’s all pretty much nice and grounded. It’s like the Daredevil & Spider-Man stories compared to MHA’s Generation X or X-Force (Cable’s students, not Cyclops’ Black Ops team).

What we get this season is a nice, generally complete story which has a bunch of hooks for future stories, when we get a second season. However, if we didn’t get that second season, the show had found a nice stopping point for viewers to pick up on in the manga after the show has finished. I’m glad we’ve got what we have, and I’m also glad that Studio Bones (who also does the main MHA series) picked this up, so they’ll get to continue in this universe once MHA finishes later this year.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is available for streaming on Crunchyroll. The manga is available (affiliate links) through Bookshop.org, the Crunchyroll Store, and Books-A-Million.

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