The My Hero Academia manga may be over, but there's still plenty from the franchise for fans to look forward to. An eighth and final season of the anime is scheduled to release in the fourth quarter of 2025, and an anime adaption for the Vigilantes spin-off series has been announced at Jump Festa '25. Bones, the same animation studio that works on the My Hero Academia anime, will also produce the Vigilantes spin-off. The Vigilantes anime is set to premiere in April 2025, with Bones sharing a first-look teaser of the anime at Jump Festa. The teaser gives fans a good look at how the protagonist, Koichi Haimawari, appears in the show.
Bones has shared the main staff of the series on the official Vigilantes website. The staff is stacked with veterans who have worked on some of the most popular anime in recent memory. The director for Vigilantes will be Suzuki Kenichi, best known for his work on Cells at Work and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. The character designs will be handled by Yoshida Takahiko, an artist best known for working on Big Windup! and Yowamushi Pedal. The composer for My Hero Academia, Hayashi Yukira, will bring the series' music to Vigilantes. With all these high-end talents working on the spin-off anime, Vigilantes is already setting itself up as being one of the most anticipated animes of 2025!
My Hero Academy takes place in a world where the majority of people have superpowers, known as Quirks in-universe. People can become licensed heroes and work for an agency as official superheroes, but those who fight crime without a license are deemed vigilantes. My Hero Academy: Vigilantes takes place five years before the events of the main series and stars a vigilante named Koichi, who has a Quirk that allows him to travel fast across any flat surface. Unfortunately, the catch is that he needs to make contact with the surface in at least three places on his body. He teams up with other vigilantes to fight off supervillains and goes by The Crawler.
The series was published by Shueisha for the Jump Comics+ imprint in Japan and the Shonen Jump+ magazine. Vigilantes lasted for six years, running from 2016 to 2022, releasing fifteen volumes. It was the second My Hero Academia spin-off to release, proceeding My Hero Academia: Smash!! and follow-up by Team-Up Missions. However, Vigilantes doesn't feature any of the characters from the main series in major roles. While prominent heroes like All-Might make small appearances in the series, Vigilantes primarily focuses on original characters not related to the cast of the main series.
The spin-off offers fans a unique perspective of the world of My Hero Academia, showing what things were like before Deku gained the power of One for All. Whereas the main series focuses more on superhero-ing as a business and career, Vigilantes centers on the people who work outside the establishment. It's a vastly different setting between those who are taught to be heroes and those who learn by doing.