Right from the start, Izuku Midoriya (alias Deku) does not have the best cards in hand at the start of ‘Boku No Hero Academia’. He has no birth powers, he has been bullied almost all his life, and then he has a hard time learning to control All Might’s One For All.
He is a character with certain tragic tropes that makes you want to be on his team very well, but at the beginning of the manga he was going to be much more pathetic.
An older protagonist…and an office worker?
Like many manga series, ‘Boku No Hero Academia‘ began with a self-contained story titled ‘My Hero’ that Kohei Horikoshi published in 2008. Although it changed a lot later, the bases of the manga that we know now were planted there, and it gives us certain clues of what could have been.
Specifically, who has changed the most has been Dekuwho had a slightly less cute character design and was called Jack Midoriya. He was also a bit clumsy and life was not going too well for him, but this Midoriya was a puny office worker who was in charge of selling weapons and different items to the professional heroes.
Jack Midoriya had anemia, was shy, complaining and everyone trampled on him. Although not in the most legal or orthodox way, Jack also tries to become a hero to make the world a better place… but it is very possible that this approach did not work in the long term for a series in continuous publication, starting with that an adult office worker was not the ideal protagonist for a series geared towards teenagers.
“Since the protagonist was a salaryman, this manga was not very appropriate for a shonen magazine,” Horikoshi said when the story was reissued in 2018’s Shonen Jump+. “However, this one-shot is, for me, my masterpiece. If I may say so, it is my highest peak and if I get the chance I would like to draw it completely again. That’s how emotionally attached I am to it.”
After a few changes for serialization, Jack became Izuku and got rid of some of the less graceful components of his personality and took a few years off him. Deku was also a bit pathetic at the beginning of the series, especially compared to some of his companions, but little by little he has been coming out of his shell and has shown that he is one of the greatest heroes in anime.