MANGA REVIEW | "My Hero Academia: Team Up Missions" - Vol. 6
See the look on Deku’s face above? That’s exactly how I looked when I read the sixth volume of My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions. Yoko Akiyama’s spinoff of Kohei Horikoshi’s hit manga was supposed to be a unique what-if series where heroes of different calibers would work together to fight crime. This should be the coolest spinoff of My Hero Academia around, but instead, it’s some of the dumbest stories one could imagine. After suffering through Volume Six of Team-Up Missions, I have no choice but to quit this spinoff.
Playing babysitter. Picking up trash. A lovesick student in need of assistance. Working on a manga. None of these scenarios in this volume do anything to push the characters forward or make them more interesting. What’s more, Akiyama is still stuck on using the main three characters (Deku, Bakugo, and Todoroki) for almost all of the stories, instead of using heroes-in-training that need a bit more spotlight. Seeing this happen on and on again is making me sigh long, loudly, and frustratingly.
Is any of this entertaining? Kind of. Bakugo and Todoroki battling it out for top trash picker-upper is funny for a moment. But they don’t do anything with it that I haven’t seen on some old TGIF sitcom or even 1990s PBS children’s television! The scenario with the student in love with Ochaco is a tiny bit interesting, but all it does is show off the tropes of Mineta and the other boys without delivering so much as a punchline.
Not even a chapter starring Tsuyu has anything worthy of merit. It’s just another tale of a hero who doesn’t think their Quirk is all that great, until someone shows them the ropes. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come across this in My Hero Academia, DC Comics, Marvel, and even Image Comics! Again, it does nothing new, and it adds zero growth to the characters.
My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions is a failure of a spinoff. It’s the Joey to Friends, the Joanie Loves Chachi to Happy Days, and the Top of the Heap to Married…With Children. (Yes, that’s two awful spinoffs Matt LeBlanc was in!) It promised readers one thing, and instead delivered dull, uninspired stories that don’t even have the guts to use any unknown heroes.
I’m so glad there was success with Vigilantes. It shows that there is a good way to do a spinoff of a popular series. But with Team-Up Missions and the “comedic” 4-koma SMASH!!, My Hero Academia is batting 1 for 3 on its spinoff record. And if another series doesn’t come around to help show the vast world of My Hero Academia in a better light, then this should-be-franchise may be in danger of fizzling out.
For now, I have no choice but to revoke Team-Up Missions’s hero card, and point it in the direction of the unemployment center. Enjoy flipping burgers, ya hack!
FINAL GRADE:
Promotional consideration provided by Chantelle Sturt of VIZ Media.
