Who Would Have Thought the Creator of ‘My Hero Academia’ Had a Knack for Horror?

Shonen fans saw the end of an era when My Hero Academia‘s manga and anime ended last year. For nearly a decade, Kohei Horikoshi’s superhero series carried the torch for what would define the medium, right up to a triumphant end. While the series continues in anime through prequel spin-offs, as superhero media are wont to do, Horikoshi recently got his pen working again with a brand-new one-shot series. To everyone’s surprise, Horikoshi didn’t spin the block on superheroes. He wrote a horror series called Quit Laughing, Shijima. After reading it, I wouldn’t be mad if it got picked up as an official series or if Horikoshi embraced horror as his new genre.

Quit Laughing, Shijima starts out like a paint-by-numbers high school romance. You’ve got Azumi, a class clown who can’t, for the life of him, get his classmates to laugh at his jokes. And you’ve got Shijima, the school’s bubbly girl who doubles over in a laughing fit at everything he says. All the while, Shijima tries her damnedest to cover her face to hide her snaggle tooth. He likes her, and she obviously likes him. Ever since Azumi transferred to the sleepy seaside town, they’ve been childhood friends. They also totally dig each other, even though they’ve never fessed up by having a real conversation about their feelings. When Azumi finally manages to muster the courage to ask Shijima a real question, he shrugs it off with that same damn smile that made her the object of everyone’s affection. Although Azumi’s not immune to Shijima’s charms, he notices something’s off. In fact, things have been off in their town since he transferred here.

He’s seen gargantuan demons skulking around town for years. But for whatever reason, he’s the only one who seems to notice the otherworldly oddities. Either the folks don’t have his sight, or they know something menacing is in their town and choose to look the other way. Turns out there’s a reason: the town’s into ritualistic cult stuff, like human sacrifices to appease the gods Azumi’s been gawking at against everyone’s warnings. When these oddities start stalking Shijima, Azumi dives headfirst into danger to save her—even though she doesn’t want to be saved.

The first thing MHA fans will attest to is the clearjump in quality of Horikoshi’s art style the moment the series concluded. Ever since MHA ended, Horikoshi has infrequently shared art of his characters that is nothing short of stunning. Sure, Horikoshi was knocking it out of the park toward MHA‘s conclusion with awe-inspiring manga panels, but that was under the duress of a weekly release schedule. Quit Smiling, Shijima benefits from Horikoshi not grinding himself into dust under grueling deadlines. The result is a short-but-sweet horrorcore manga where Horikoshi showcases his hidden talent for evocative creature design.

From the jump, one of the most interesting things about Quit Laughing, Shijima is that it recontextualizes a strength Horikoshi built up during My Hero Academia into a fascinating premise for a horror series. That strength is his uncanny ability to draw characters with infectious smiles. Anytime a fan saw a smile grace the chiseled face of MHA‘s preeminent superhero, All Might, they knew everything would be… well, all right, because he was there to save the day. Rather than using a smile as a simple signpost for good times ahead, Horikoshi’s one-shot explores how a smile can hide something obvious: the inner turmoil of the person wearing it.

Few things bring me more joy than watching a mangaka showcase their versatility by writing a one-shot series that’s worlds different from the big-name series that catapulted them into the mainstream. What makes one-shots so exciting to me as a manga reader is how they act as a creative reprieve for artists. They get to pump the brakes on the long-running series they’ve been burning the midnight oil writing on a gruesome weekly schedule and get their creative juices flowing by writing something entirely different. Sometimes, a one-shot is just a fun break. Sometimes it’s a backdoor pilot leading to a brand-new series. And sometimes, it can lead to a new creative body of work that rivals the acclaim of the series a mangaka took a break from. That happened with Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto, who penned Look Back during his mid-series break from his unhinged shonen magnum opus. While Look Back is very much a product of the wacky mind that concocted stories like Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man, it also leveraged Fujimoto’s star power to write a moving ode to the unglamorous world of artists.

Parasocially, I felt Quit Laughing, Shijima worked as a holdover to a concept he introduced with MHA‘s knife-wielding villainess, Toga Himiko. Like Himiko, Shijima’s smile is taken at face value as a one-dimensional expression folks don’t have to read into. While Himiko’s yandere-style grimace is for the shock and awe of page-turning horror, it hides a sadness behind it that takes nearly the entire series for her rival, Uraraka Ochako, to unpack. It’s why the pair are among the series’ most popular characters. Shijima feels like Horikoshi going back to the drawing board and asking himself: what if he drew a character with Uraraka’s beaming smile while hiding the same level of inner turmoil as Himiko? Far be it from me to finger-wag a creative for dogfooding his own ideas, because his “what if fake smile” theme in a ritualistic horror one-shot blew me away.

As a frequent viewer of Japanese reality TV, I was always puzzled by the phenomenon of women covering their mouths whenever they laugh. Whether it boiled down to a mix of social modesty and embarrassment of showing one’s teeth is beyond me. Quit Laughing, Shijima felt like it reached into my brain, its finger on that social phenomenon. Despite everyone treating Shijima like the people’s princess, they’d switch up on her if she showed her teeth while laughing because that meant they’d have to see her snaggle-toothed smile. So, Shijima adopted a fake-ass veiled laugh to brush off insecurities—like the town only treating her well because she’s their next human sacrifice. Girlhood is a motherfucker.It’s no wonder she fell for Azuma. He was the first person to tell her no one can truly laugh without showing their teeth. That’s like the inverse of a man telling a woman to smile more whenever she’s got a case of the sads. Horikoshi making that the thematic throughline of a ritualistic horror one-shot was as provocative as “Plus Ultra” or hearing “You Say Run” play during pivotal moments of My Hero Academia.

今週発売の週刊少年ジャンプ37･38合併号に新作読切センターカラー61p「笑わないでよ しじまさん」が掲載されてます！ぜひ！ pic.twitter.com/1gysj9kFsQ

— 堀越耕平 (@horikoshiko) August 12, 2026

The jury is still out on whether Quit Laughing, Shijima will spin off into its own horror series. Lord knows it ended in a way that left the door ajar. But as it stands, Quit Laughing, Shijima is an equal parts provocative and inspiring horror story I’m glad Horikoshi took the time to write.

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