My Hero Academia: Vigilantes

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is the official spin-off and prequel to Kohei Horikoshi's superhero saga, written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and illustrated by Betten Court. Instead of following the elite students of U.A. High, it turns its attention to people who never earned a license yet cannot walk past someone in trouble. That change in scale gives the work its own identity inside the franchise, one built on street-level crime, improvised heroics, and the daily pressure of living in a society where most people have powers but only a chosen few are sanctioned to use them.

The experience is looser and more grounded than the flagship series. Koichi Haimawari, a college student who has quietly shelved his dream, gets pulled into unlicensed hero work alongside the performer Kazuho Haneyama and the gruff vigilante known as Knuckleduster. The cases tend to be smaller and more personal, which keeps the stakes close at hand, and the humor and slice-of-life texture carry a good deal of the running time between fights. Readers who enjoy the parent series often value this for its different angle rather than as a substitute for it.

It works as an entry point even without prior knowledge of the world, though longtime fans will catch more of the connective tissue. The manga ran for fifteen collected volumes, and the 2025 anime adaptation covers thirteen episodes with an English dub available. Anyone drawn to underdog stories, urban superheroics, or the idea that heroism does not require official permission should find it easy to settle into.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is a spin-off and prequel to Kōhei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia, set several years before the main series in a society where roughly eighty percent of the population possesses a superhuman trait known as a Quirk. Its central figure is Koichi Haimawari, a listless college student who quietly uses his modest ability to help strangers even though he has long since given up on becoming a professional Hero.

Everything shifts for Koichi after he and Kazuho Haneyama, a street performer who goes by Pop☆Step, are cornered by thugs and rescued by the veteran vigilante Knuckleduster. The encounter pulls the two of them into unlicensed crime fighting, operating outside both the law and the official system that decides who is permitted to save people.

The story's central conflict grows out of that gap between good intentions and legal authority, as the group takes on criminals who misuse their Quirks while drawing scrutiny from professional Heroes and the authorities. Koichi has to weigh how far he is willing to go for the people right in front of him, and what the word hero actually means on the streets around him.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is a companion series within the larger My Hero Academia franchise. It is not a retelling or replacement for the main storyline. Instead, it functions as both a spin-off and a prequel, unfolding several years before the events centered on U.A. High School. The manga was written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and illustrated by Betten Court, and it launched in 2016 before moving to Shonen Jump+ and eventually concluding with fifteen collected volumes.

The entry's anime adaptation brings this side of the franchise to television as a thirteen-episode series aired in 2025, with a second season following in early 2026. Within the broader property, Vigilantes expands the world by focusing on unlicensed heroes and street-level crime rather than the flagship hero course. This makes it a complementary branch: newcomers can approach it as a self-contained story, while franchise followers can see how it enriches the setting and history of My Hero Academia.