Kohei Horikoshi After My Hero Academia: What the 10-Year Serial Actually Achieved

Kohei Horikoshi finished My Hero Academia on August 5, 2024. The final chapter ran in Weekly Shonen Jump issue 36-37 of that year. The manga had been in serialization for ten years and one month, accumulating 430 chapters and 42 collected volumes. The Bones anime adaptation, which had run from 2016 across seven seasons, also ended its main TV run in October 2024. A film trilogy was announced for 2025-2027, but the core serial — manga and anime together — is over.

Horikoshi is now 39 years old. For a decade, he was the writer of one of the three or four most-read shonen manga in the world; My Hero Academia at its peak was selling 8-10 million volumes per year and was, at certain points in 2018-2019, the single most-discussed shonen manga in Western fandom. The series ended on schedule, with the writer alive and capable of choosing whether and how to continue working.

This is what My Hero Academia actually built across those ten years, what the ending says about Horikoshi’s craft, and what the post-MHA period looks like for him.

The Western-influenced shonen

What made My Hero Academia distinctive when it started in 2014 — and what made it commercially explosive in 2016-2018 once the anime caught on — was how openly it borrowed from American superhero comics. Horikoshi has named X-Men, Spider-Man, and the broader Marvel cinematic universe as influences. The manga’s setting (Japan in a world where 80% of the population has superpowers) reads as a direct synthesis of shonen serialization conventions with superhero genre conventions.

This synthesis matters because it expanded the audience. Western readers who would not have engaged with a traditional shonen — Naruto, Bleach, Fairy Tail — could approach My Hero Academia as a superhero comic with manga pacing. The 2016 anime adaptation accelerated this by translating the superhero aesthetics in ways that visual learners could grasp immediately. By 2018, the show was the most-watched anime on Crunchyroll’s American service, and the manga was the highest-selling new Jump series since the early 2010s.

What’s worth understanding structurally is that the superhero borrowings were not surface-level. Horikoshi adopted the genre’s structural conventions: the school-of-heroes setup (echoing Marvel’s Xavier Institute), the hero/villain duality with each character framing the other, the long-running “we are constructing the next generation” plot, and the explicit moral framework that superheroes operate as a public good. All of these are American comic conventions adapted to manga form.

The middle period and the structural challenge

The structural challenge any 10-year shonen runs into is that the school setup that worked for the early arcs becomes constraining once the protagonist needs to grow up. Naruto handled this through the Shippuden timeskip; Bleach handled it by abandoning school for the spirit world; Hunter x Hunter never really left the original setup but slowed the timescale dramatically.

My Hero Academia’s middle period (chapters 100-280, roughly 2017-2020) handled this by progressively raising the stakes within the school framework. The villain organization went from peripheral threat to existential opposition. The school became the front line in a society-level war. Major arcs (Joint Training, Endeavor Internship, Pro Hero Arc) progressively moved the action out of the school while keeping the school as the structural ground.

This worked, mostly. The middle period maintained the manga’s commercial momentum. The anime adaptation tracked the manga closely. The fan engagement remained high through 2020-2021.

What started to strain was the cast. Horikoshi had created an unusually large named cast in the early arcs — by chapter 200, the manga had introduced approximately 30 hero students with named quirks plus dozens of villains plus pro heroes plus civilian supporting characters. Maintaining all of them across long arcs becomes a structural problem. Several of the middle-period arcs are paced around finding screen time for established characters rather than around plot momentum.

The endgame and what Horikoshi chose to do

The final saga of My Hero Academia (chapters 306-430, roughly 2021-2024) is what the manga will be most remembered by, and it is the period where Horikoshi’s craft choices are most visible.

The structural decision he made was to end the war with the villains in a series of personal confrontations rather than as a single climactic battle. Deku vs. Shigaraki. Bakugo vs. Shigaraki. The pro heroes vs. All For One in parallel sequences. Each major character gets a personal scene that resolves their individual arc, and the cumulative effect of those scenes is the endgame’s emotional weight.

This is not how shonen manga endings typically work. The dominant convention is a single climactic battle (Naruto vs. Sasuke, Goku vs. Frieza, Yusuke vs. Sensui) where the protagonist’s full development pays off in one sustained sequence. My Hero Academia did something structurally closer to ensemble cinema — multiple parallel resolutions that compound into a larger emotional payoff.

Whether this worked is contested. Some readers found the ending satisfying as a deliberate departure from shonen convention. Others found it diffuse and felt that the manga’s emotional peak should have come earlier. Both readings are defensible.

What’s harder to argue with is the chapter-by-chapter pacing of the final 40 chapters. Horikoshi did not rush the ending. The final chapter is followed by a brief epilogue showing the heroes ten years later. The manga ends with appropriate finality. This is, structurally, what shonen endings are supposed to do, and it’s harder than it looks. Many comparable series — Naruto, Bleach in its original run, Fairy Tail — have endings that are widely considered weaker than they should be.

What the ten years actually built

What My Hero Academia built, beyond commercial success, is a framework that other shonen mangaka are now using. The superhero-school setting has spawned multiple post-MHA series (Mashle: Magic and Muscles, Undead Unluck, the still-running Mission: Yozakura Family). The visual design language — distinct hero costumes, “quirk” power systems where each character has one fundamentally simple ability with creative applications, the school-as-battlefield framework — has become genre convention.

More structurally, the manga proved that a single shonen serial could maintain commercial momentum across a full decade without major creative compromises. This was, in 2014, not obvious. Naruto and Bleach had struggled in their final years. The fear in shonen publishing in the mid-2010s was that the decade-long serial was becoming structurally untenable. My Hero Academia is the case study that proved it remained possible.

The Bones anime and what it accomplished

The Bones My Hero Academia anime adaptation across seven seasons (2016-2024) is the third pillar of the project. The adaptation maintained consistent staff and visual approach across its full run, with director rotation handled gracefully. Episode 1 of Season 1 and the final episode of Season 7 look like they’re from the same series, which is structurally rare in long-running anime.

What the anime accomplished, beyond animating the manga, was establishing a Western audience for the property that became larger than the manga’s Western audience. Crunchyroll viewership for My Hero Academia at its peak was higher than for any other anime on the platform. The dub became the standard reference for “successful long-running shonen anime localization” through the late 2010s and 2020s.

The film trilogy that’s been announced for 2025-2027 is, structurally, where the property continues in animated form. Whether it adds anything beyond what the TV series accomplished is an open question.

Where Horikoshi goes from here

Horikoshi has not yet announced a new long-form serial as of early 2026. He has stated in interviews that he wants to take a break and that his next project may be in a different register — possibly a short serialized work or one-shots before another long-form serial.

This is the normal post-decade pattern for shonen mangaka. Eiichiro Oda has not stopped (and probably won’t until One Piece ends). Kentaro Miura was still working when he died. But mangaka like Tite Kubo (Bleach) and Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist) have done multi-year gaps between major works. Whether Horikoshi follows that pattern, or whether he starts a new serial more quickly, is one of the structural questions for shonen manga publishing in the late 2020s.

What’s clear is that he has the cultural capital to publish whatever he wants. Shueisha will give him space in any of their magazines. International publishers will commission translations on announcement. The fan base he built across My Hero Academia is large enough to sustain commercial success for almost any next project.

What My Hero Academia means in 2026

Looking at the body of work as a completed entity, My Hero Academia is the most successful Western-influenced shonen manga ever made. The series demonstrated that the genre conventions of American superhero comics could be naturalized into shonen structure without either form being compromised. The commercial scale of the property at its peak was comparable to the largest manga IPs in modern publishing.

The encyclopedia entry, with publication history, ratings, and licensed availability across 15+ Arab markets, is on the My Hero Academia anime page.

The ten-year project is closed. Whether what comes next from Horikoshi matches it is the question that will define his next decade.