“Zygotes”
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Kohei Horikoshi
Translation: Caleb D. Cook
What They Say
Midoriya inherits the superpower of the world’s greatest hero, but greatness won’t come easy.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Jumping into My Hero Academia this far into it continues to be a good bit of fun, especially since the property looks to be entering its final phase next year. Having done this before with other titles helps and having seen a good chunk of the anime balances it out. I’ve liked the property but it’s not something I’m hardcore about – unlike my youngest kid who can’t get enough. With the series working some big moments and playing with an interesting cast of characters, it’s easy to get into it at this point. I had liked what little I had seen of Horikoshi’s previous work in Shonen Jump and it’s clearly been a few years since Barrage, so I was looking forward to revisiting his artwork.
While things have been going in interesting directions and pretty accessible overall even if you’ve just seen a few seasons of the anime, this installment needs more backstory. The initial part is fun enough as we e how everyone is going through their training and prepping for what’s to come and how they all have to step up even if their future opponent has been taken down a bit and slightly reduced by what the US side did to help. Everyone is looking at this with the right perspective and mindset even though what they’re facing is going to be such a real problem and the fight of their lives when they get down to it. It works well in reminding of the stakes but also just making it clear where everything stands at the moment after the big fight that we just had.
The back half take place in the U.A. Forest where we see Toru doing some investigating and we end up seeing how Yuga, through flashback, has had some hard times that has put him into a bad spot. This is my first time seeing Yuga I think so the character doesn’t resonate and everything here feels very much out of left field. We do get some clearing up of events from a bigger fight before the most recent one with Yuga revealing to Izuku that he was involved in helping the League recently and he’s incredibly down on himself for obvious reasons. It’s a highly emotional sequence overall but without the grounding of past installments for me to really put it into context, I’m a touch lost. I did some light skimming to flesh it out a bit more but it looks like such an expansive piece overall that I’m just not going to get it contextualized in this installment.
In Summary:
I like getting to see the UA kids getting things in order for the fight ahead and that while they’re not exactly enthused, nor should they be, they’re not in a panic or working through waves of depression over it. The rest of it is interesting but I’m not sure what it means in the big picture but that’s fine as I expected to have that happen more than it has by jumping into this as late as I have. There’s a lot going on in this issue and long-time fans are going to get a lot of it.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Shonen Jump
Release Date: December 5th, 2021
