Interview with MHA Editor – Volume 3
The Honyasan bookstore mobile app in Japan released part three of their interview series with My Hero Academia’s editor on July 22, 2019. It’s part of their campaign to celebrate MHA’s 5th Anniversary.
Enjoy our translation of the interview below! Highlights include him discussing how Hawks was created super last minute and him drawing a picture of Horikoshi (you can see it in the YouTube video of the interview ).
Interview Translation for Part 1 and Part 2
As mentioned there’s also a video of the interview on Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT3llJeZyt0 ), and the text in the article is pretty much a direct transcription of the video. But if you watch the interview you can see him draw Horikoshi and he shares a picture of Horikoshi’s drawing of himself too…
Can you share with us a time or event that made you think “Horikoshi is amazing”?
I already spoke about this a bit earlier with Endeavor, but the No. 2 hero Hawks kind of matches with him, and when we decided to bring in this character we decided to bring him out amongst the top 10 pro heroes. Several of the top heroes were characters that had already been in the story, but we had to come up with several new characters, and it was really poorly planned (lol).
This is embarrassing to admit. But it was really one, maybe two, weeks before the chapter and we finally sat down to talk about what we should do about the pro heroes. That arc wasn’t finalized beforehand. We had the name Hawks and we knew his position but nothing about his visual appearance and personality had been decided on yet. Even on the draft storyboards there were just blank spaces with notes like “here’s where Hawks will be introduced” or “here’s where we’ll see the No. 2 hero”.
When we were discussing the storyboards we talked really briefly about how we wanted Hawks to be cool, and not just shallow cool but the kind of character that would get popular with readers.
I remember thinking it would be good to have at least one popular pro hero character, and that’s how Hawks appeared. As soon as the weekly volume with Hawks in it was released there was a huge fan reaction and even though he was barely in it, and he became a popular character in no time. He took 4th place in the popularity poll before he had even appeared in an actual manga volume I think. The reaction from readers was truly amazing, I don’t think there’s many authors that can take an offhanded comment like “let’s make this character popular” and really do it.
There aren’t many people with the ability to draw a character and purposely make them popular, so after Hawks happened I realized “Ah, this guy’s a real genius”– I remember feeling chills down my spine.
Can you draw a picture of Horikoshi?
This is the most embarrassing thing for an editor to be asked to do (lol) I can’t remember what his bangs look like right now (lol).
Have you ever drawn Horikoshi before?
No, this is my first time (lol).
He’s got a bit of a beard. But I’m not sure what the best look for his beard is (lol).
I really don’t know… oh he has a bit of a goatee, although this part is more like just 5-o’clock shadow (lol).
I don’t know… how was this again… oh I don’t think he had that.. Hmm.
He’s often just wearing a simple T-shirt. He rarely goes out so. Anyway, all done, though this doesn’t look that much like him (lol).
From 0-100% how would you score your drawing?
I’ve got the parts right but that’s about it.
He’s got a beard, glasses, and long hair, but that’s the only thing here that looks like him (lol).
You know, when I told him I was going to have to draw him he said “Let me show you how to draw me.” He’s just so humble.
You told him you were going to draw him?
Yes, and when I told him about it he said he’d show me how and drew this little sketch on the side of a manuscript for me. (Shows photo of Horikoshi’s sketch on cellphone to camera)
He visually seems quite serious, but he’s quite fashionable too. But inside he’s always wearing T-shirts (lol) Because he doesn’t go out.
Vol. 4 of this interview will be posted on August 1st and we asked the editor about MHA trivia and behind the scenes info! Look forward to it!
We’ve also uploaded a video of this 5th Anniversary! Part 3 “MHA Editor Discusses 5 Year History” interview on the Honyasan Youtube account!! Check it out at the link below!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT3llJeZyt0
We’ll be posting part four of the interview soon which includes a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes talk about Hawks– and there’s a part five of the interview coming out in mid-August too. In the meantime, be sure to join the Subreddit Discord for discussions!