MHA 425: All the makeover reveals

Mic owns a suit! But he pairs it with his hero glasses, fingerless gloves, and banana hairstyle. The studded tie, “omedeto [congrats] yeahhh!!!” and “graduation starring Present Mic” are sending me. Also his own logo sticker on his laptop — looks like Mic may have learned some branding lessons from All Might.

Izuku has a new haircut, buzzing off the right side. But he still can’t tie his tie.

Aizawa wears his hair tied back. Sort of. It’s like he tied the left side so his good eye is clear but said fuck it on the right because there’s just no point in getting it out of his face.

Katsuki has on his tie AND jacket despite having his right arm in a sling (like All Might after Kamino).

Jiro’s ear got a prosthetic.

Koda kept his horns.

Shoji put back on his mask.

Nezu wears a jacket with tails.

Shoto and Tokoyami got fluffy.

EraserHead back in action!

Everyone’s ragging on Izuku’s new haircut as if he had any kind of style before.

Confession: I really liked MHA 424.

While I definitely liked the Izuku-Katsuki-All Might development (and my heart broke realizing this is how Katsuki learned Izuku gave away One For All), I want to focus on the first part of the chapter. What All Might said about Tenko was kind to both Tenko and Izuku — it’s a recognition that Izuku completed OFA (even if he passed it on) and that Izuku saved Tenko’s true soul (the only piece of Tenko independent of AFO) as someone who wanted to be a hero to society’s outcasts. I don’t read All Might or Izuku framing Tenko’s final wishes as a negative thing. I think the line about Tenko being the leader of the LOV means something much deeper.

To understand the full context, you have to read 416-424 together. Back in 417, Tenko challenged Izuku on the doorstep of his house: “Say you learn more, what then? Say you expose [my] past to the light? Will that change a damn thing?” Izuku said he didn’t know, but pushed on until he stopped Tenko from murdering his family.

That’s when Tenko’s hatred disappeared, the crying child disintegrated, and the soul took on the appearance of TOMURA.

AFO referred to this as “Tenko’s spiritual defeat,” akin to Tenko’s heart “suppressing the id.” And AFO said this defeat is what caused Tenko’s physical body to break down. But that’s AFO’s usual doublespeak. What he’s really saying is that Tenko became human. Tenko’s id -- his instinctive, impulsive darkness and “death drive” -- were overcome…

And yet Tenko still wanted to be TOMURA, the leader of the villains. It’s why he looks like Tomura and refers to himself as “Tomura Shigaraki” at the end of 423.

Without AFO’s distortions, and with the power of his heart fully restored, Tenko still wanted to make a better world for the villains. This “true” Tenko would never choose to kill his family, yet he still wanted to destroy the toxic elements of hero society. He still wanted the best for his villain friends. Tenko showed this true self, along with his true name and his true face, to Izuku. In the end, he had faith Izuku could do what he failed to do. Izuku, in turn, promised he would.

So, will exposing Tenko’s past to the light change a damn thing? Izuku said he didn’t know the answer in 417, but I think he does now. And he’ll have All Might and Katsuki in his corner supporting him.

Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.

Seven years ago, Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).

But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into years. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of Monsters. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the very long-awaited Book Two:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

I've been staring at the spine of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous thing, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.

After seven years, it would have been hard for Book Two to live up to all that anticipation, but goddammit if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.

There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of Monsters this year – and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.

In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to Monsters and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:

https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#oh-my-papa

Hi friend, I hope you are doing alright and taking care of yourself. I wanted to respond to say that, while I too am a general appreciator of Horikoshi’s work, it’s still totally okay to feel how you feel and to criticize what you don’t like. Horikoshi isn’t a perfect writer (nobody is) AND he’s writing a weekly serial with external constraints like volume publications and anime premieres and movie tie-ins, so yeah sometimes things get rough. For example, I’ve been open about not liking the Nagant or Star & Stripe arcs myself. And I totally agree 423 and 424 had way too much Important Stuff crammed into 2 chapters, and it served to jolt the reader out of the (apparently false) sense of “yay, WE ARE HERE, ganbare, happy ending incoming!” We don’t know yet if that jolt was intentional or not; we’ll only know after the epilogue arc. Maybe Horikoshi ended the “battle that decides it all” on a sour note on purpose and we’ll understand why soon enough (though it also seems like he’s just not one for hospital angst). Also, sometimes Horikoshi sticks bits in the manga to create a parallel, make pretty art, or give himself a future “out” — but it turns out not to mean much (or not mean much for that character) in hindsight. Eg, all the stuff about OFA being a cursed quirk just like AFO, which made it seem like Izuku would be led down the wrong path, or meat-puppeted by the quirk, but nope, that wasn’t used for Izuku at all. Same with Izuku’s arms and how they were rewound one chapter later, with seemingly minimal lasting damage. We can only analyze Horikoshi’s choices in retrospect, because while it was happening it seemed like super important foreshadowing. That said, you don’t have to “brush anything aside,” or like any/all of Horikoshi’s choices, or even keep reading the manga.

MHA 424 leak reactions

I thought I’d go to sleep on MHA 424 and think on it overnight, and honestly I’m still inclined to keep out of the conversations happening at the moment. I understand the emotions of a story not going the way you wanted, but we are just beginning the epilogue arc. There are at least 6-8 chapters left, and that is a LOT of space for Horikoshi to land this plane. I see folks screaming how the thematic narrative failed, how hero society will keep making the same mistakes, how OFA’s “old” purpose was to kill but it’s “new” purpose is to save so WTF happened, etc….but none of that is true YET. We only know the current status of AFO and Tomura, and even then we don’t have the FULL story — Horikoshi is doing the thing where he only showed us PART of the Izuku-Tomura conversation in 423, and then dropped a new part of that conversation via flashback in 424. What else haven’t we been shown yet? Moreover, the story is now back at UA. The titular “hero academia,” as Horikoshi’s author note pointed out. UA is the heart of hero education where hero students learn to use their strength to correct the unfairness of the world (as Aizawa said before the quirk apprehension test). Maybe this time, instead of using their quirk strength, they’ll use their experience and their big hearts to change the world for the better. And if that’s true, then maybe Horikoshi still has some more “magic of friendship” in store for us.

MHA 424 leak reactions

I thought I’d go to sleep on MHA 424 and think on it overnight, and honestly I’m still inclined to keep out of the conversations happening at the moment. I understand the emotions of a story not going the way you wanted, but we are just beginning the epilogue arc. There are at least 6-8 chapters left, and that is a LOT of space for Horikoshi to land this plane. I see folks screaming how the thematic narrative failed, how hero society will keep making the same mistakes, how OFA’s “old” purpose was to kill but it’s “new” purpose is to save so WTF happened, etc….but none of that is true YET. We only know the current status of AFO and Tomura, and even then we don’t have the FULL story — Horikoshi is doing the thing where he only showed us PART of the Izuku-Tomura conversation in 423, and then dropped a new part of that conversation via flashback in 424. What else haven’t we been shown yet? Moreover, the story is now back at UA. The titular “hero academia,” as Horikoshi’s author note pointed out. UA is the heart of hero education where hero students learn to use their strength to correct the unfairness of the world (as Aizawa said before the quirk apprehension test). Maybe this time, instead of using their quirk strength, they’ll use their experience and their big hearts to change the world for the better. And if that’s true, then maybe Horikoshi still has some more “magic of friendship” in store for us.

🌘 A Tragic Hero 🌒

In honor of zoom call ♡Aizawa♡

found me some ohuhu markers n gave them a go tonight!

"I won't let you give up like this and die tormented by your actions, not as long as I am your hero course teacher and you are my student"

“Water gun” Izuku in his All Might bathing suit!

Just a thought for the night, but remember in 2016 there were all these accounts that seemed really really telling you all the ways Hillary Clinton was some kind of demon woman, just the worst, and really Trump wouldn't be worse and maybe he'd even be better?

and then it turned out they got banned for being literally Russian agents and never came back because spoiler they were?

does it feel like that all over again? just a thought.

did... shiggy just died i-. idk what to feel. So he is not coming bach huh..... :(. OFA is gone too....

I don’t know what to feel either, anon. We really have to wait and see what comes next. But I do think Horikoshi is trying to say something about rebirth, so the rest of this post is going to be something like an elegy for the Tomura Shigaraki we knew (and what that can mean for Izuku): Why rebirth? Why is Tomura doomed? Tomura’s entire existence was tainted by AFO. Tomura can change his name, change his hair color, kill the AFO vestige, etc., but it’s impossible for him to escape AFO. How society would view him or his “redemption” is irrelevant; it’s that HE now knows his entire life, from conception onwards, was never his own. For Tomura, a happy ending is being completely free from AFO, deciding things fully for himself, and knowing his decisions are his own. It’s not a happy ending to remove Tenko from Tomura’s origin trauma only to plunge him into Twice’s “am I really me” trauma.

What AFO’s final, awful reveal showed is that even if Tomura Shigaraki became Tenko Shimura again, it’s not a rebirth. The very first cells of “Tenko Shimura’s” being were stained by AFO since AFO manipulated Kotaro into conceiving Tenko. Tenko’s parents and childhood friends were totally under AFO’s thumb. “Tenko” has no path to freedom; he has to be rebuilt from ash, one way or another.

For my own aesthetic tastes, I would very much prefer for Tenko to have agency over this. If he was going to disintegrate, I’d prefer it to be a clear choice — like Katsuki and Toshinori choosing moves that brought them to the brink of death. I don’t like the idea that Tenko had no choice in life or death, and that disintegrating is just another indignity that AFO manipulated him into. But maybe his story was always destined to be a tragedy, no matter how hard he tried to fight it.

Of course, there are ways that the spirit/consciousness of Tenko Shimura could return in a new body, and many of them do have Tenko participating actively in the process:

Phoenix quirk — Tomura disintegrates to ash so Tenko can choose to be reborn free of AFO’s distortions. (Maybe fandom was right about this theory but wrong that the phoenix was Dabi!)

Overhaul or quirk awakening - It’s possible for Overhaul (who is very much still alive and in possession of his quirk factor) to reverse the disintegration. It’s also possible that Tenko can do it himself (or that Tenko gave Izuku a quirk to do it) since Decay is half of Overhaul. Personally I don’t believe this is likely because I think Decay disappeared when AFO took control of Tomura this final time? Unclear, the end got really rushed and messy on these details for me, but if Decay is gone then it’s hard for it to “awaken.”

Rewind - The MHA standby ever since Eri’s introduction. She doesn’t have her horn anymore, so it seems unlikely, but she still has her quirk factor. The thing here is Tenko’s agency and if he would want to be rewound back to the body that AFO built for him.

All For One - Yes, Tomura could have given Izuku a quirk when they touched. What if it’s actually…All For One? Yoichi said the AFO quirk could have been the kindest in the world…and Izuku did promise to “bring it all back”… so if Tomura’s parting gift was to give the raw All For One power to Izuku, then Izuku could Overhaul and Rewind his way into healing everyone. He could borrow any quirk needed (Recovery Girl? Erasure?) use it as a tool, and then give it back because of course Izuku wouldn’t keep a stockpile for himself (absent being told he could keep a quirk). FWIW, I’d be HIGHLY amused if this happens, because it sounds straight out of a DFO fic. :)

Aura Might/OFA shenanigans - The “heroic fire” of OFA has seemingly gone out before, only to re-emerge both in the same person and in other people. I could see Tenko emerging from this fire.

Wishing energy that twists fate - Izuku and All Might both lived when they were “supposed” to die, so it could happen for Tenko too.

However, Tenko returning in a physical, corporeal form is not the only kind of rebirth that can complete his arc. It pains me SO MUCH to say this, but there’s a real chance his body doesn’t come back. Tomura fought for someone to see what was swept under the rug and understand that hero society isn’t perfect. He wanted a hero who would save him and imperfect humans like him, and he got that someone in Izuku. (He actually got it in Nana too, because of Izuku.)

Izuku Midoriya taking Tenko’s message deep into his heart and influencing all the people watching him to care more about the misfits and “villains” that pro heroes can’t help is a form of giving Tenko a new life. In the same way that the vestiges extended their power decades beyond physical death, and the same way that Shirakumo’s heroic heart survived his death and Nomu-fication, Izuku can keep Tenko’s spirit alive long after his body died. Maybe Tenko’s spirit is a new type of “heroic fire,” and it’s up to Izuku to keep those embers burning. It’s all in Izuku’s rewound, notably non-decayed hands.

Looking at it with this framing, you can also say Izuku gets his win AND save. Because even if Izuku couldn’t save Tenko’s physical body — and how could he if Tenko was doomed before either of them were born? — choosing to carry on Tenko’s legacy IS saving everything he could of that crying boy. It’s also far more immediate and tangible for Izuku to take on Tenko’s legacy rather than being unwittingly thrown into the 200 year old OFA-AFO fight. There’s something so poignant and human about an ending with quirkless Izuku humbly fighting for what Tenko believed in compared to celebrity #1 Billboard ranked hero Izuku with OFA. After all, Tenko and Izuku are 2 sides of a coin. Tenko could have had Izuku’s role in another life if OFA kept passing in the Shimura family.

Even the fact that Izuku never told anyone outside of Ochako, Katsuki, and All Might that he wanted to save Tenko works in Izuku’s favor. Izuku can help the whole world become the people Tenko challenged them to be and they’ll never know they’re actually fulfilling the dreams of a villain. (‘Cuz they’d be too biased to do it otherwise.) Finally, you know all the complaints that Izuku’s character has been stagnant in MHA’s third act? That he hasn’t really been challenged in his ideals? Maybe that hasn’t happened yet because it’s just starting NOW.

After all, Toshinori modeled “All Might” after Nana’s ideals, and she wasn’t known to the population at large. Izuku could follow their footsteps by modeling his hero career after Tenko’s ideals. We’d have multiple generations of Shimuras posthumously changing society for the bettter.

Look, I understand how emotions are running high. I’ve loved this series for years and I cried reading this chapter. I personally don’t love it if Tenko is gone, even though I can make narrative sense of it. It’s a tragic and bitter-barely-sweet ending for poor Tenko, whose very dreams of being a hero were engineered to sow division in his family and break his psyche instead of lift him up.

But none of us will know what it all means for a few more chapters. We could still have several more chapters before we get Tenko’s real finale. It’s nearing the end, but it’s not THE end yet. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and as always, curate your fandom spaces lovingly.