My Manga Shelf Presents: My Hero Academia Team-Up Missions Volume 1

It’s pretty much a guarantee that if something’s got My Hero Academia on it I’ll try it out, so hi, welcome to Team-Up Missions, a delightful little spinoff series that focuses more on, well, teamwork. You might be thinking to yourself, “Bri, the series itself generally focuses on teamwork,” but Team-Up Missions takes out all the devastating “society will crumble if the heroes lose” plot threads and replaces them with wholesome “kids learning the ins and outs of their heroic career path of choice.”

Synopsis for My Hero Academia Team Up Missions Volume 1

Now that All Might is retired, the Heroes Public Safety Commission expects there to be a rise in villain attacks. This has led to the creation of a new nationwide program that involves hero students working with the pros. This means the students gain the experience they need to become better heroes AND the streets are kept safe from potential villainous threats. Deku thinks he’s ready for this new task … assuming he can stop fanboying over the pro he gets to work with, oh, and assuming he gets put in a team that’s nice, calm, and has absolutely no hostility toward him—… yeah, I couldn’t type that with a straight face, prepare for teenage tension on an academic level!

Review

Imagine if Izuku Midoriya and his classmates actually got to go through a school day without being interrupted by final boss-level villains all the damn time. That’s basically what this manga is. That’s not to say they aren’t going up against villains, but the stakes aren’t nearly as high as they normally are, especially if you’re caught up in the manga.

Real talk: this was such a comforting read after, well, *gestures wildly toward the last manga arc*

Team Up Missions is a chance for the kids to learn directly from the heroes they aspire to be. It’s like the internship arc, a hero always with the kids to make sure things don’t get out of hand, and the kids working together to use their quirks (and their brains) to figure out how to fix the problems they come across.

Since this takes place well into All Might’s retirement, if you’re only watching the anime and picking this up, you might be surprised by a couple of things. For one, the animosity Bakugo feels toward Deku is extremely toned down since the two are now proper rivals. It’s more comical than hostile because Bakugo’s still a bad-tempered angy pomeranian who has to talk in all caps to get his point across.

The manga also lets fan favorites like Hawks and Mirko show off, so if you wanted more of them after the glimpse we got in the anime, this is a chance to see them both as heroes and teachers for the kids.

The best part is seeing who gets paired up together and how they figure out which quirks to use in certain situations. I’ve been wanting to see a team-up with the characters whose quirks revolve around what they eat/create with their body, for example, and this manga does that by putting Yaoyorozu with Fat Gum and Tamaki. I’ve also been dreaming of seeing Bakugo and Mirko, a woman who’s just as fiery as he is, and this manga does that too. It’s like getting an endless pool of fandom dream team-ups and interactions, only now it’s canon because it happens in this manga. Hell, I didn’t even think I needed to see Melissa (from the first movie My Hero Academia: Two Heroes) and Hatsume working together to create support gear, but wow, it makes perfect sense.

Also, there’s a brief showing of students from Class 1-A being paired with students from Class 1-B, which means that crossovers with other classes (and maybe even other schools) might occur. I personally hope we get to see the return of Shiketsu High kids.

Oh, and there are side stories about Bakugo’s parents, in case you were wondering how they hooked up.

Team-Up Missions is a way to give us the content we’re not getting in the regular manga at the moment. I imagine it’ll be a long while before we get any of those classroom exercises or exams where the kids are tested on their abilities by their teachers, so this spinoff takes us back to that kind of story. These short stories take us back to the days when Izuku was excited about being at U.A. and looked forward to whatever new thing he was about to learn, his biggest source of stress ranging from “how much is Kacchan gonna yell at me today” and “that kid got his soccer ball stolen, let’s help find it!”

If you liked things like the Internship Arc (before Stain showed up), the Provisional License Exam, or the beginning of My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising (the second movie) where the kids got to help the entire island with their very own, lemonade stand-esque hero agency, you’ll be into these stories.

That wasn’t a knock against lemonade stands, btw, I love seeing kids with a self-made business.

You can check Team-Up Mission over at Viz today!

(Image: Kohei Horikoshi, Yoko Akiyama/SHUEISHA Inc.)

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—