堀越 耕平
Born 1986
The creator of My Hero Academia, who fused American superhero comics with Weekly Shōnen Jump serialisation across a decade-long run. The name reduces to 7 — the inquiry.
7A 7 by its name: analyst & seeker, and therefore the inquiry.
Kohei Horikoshi had two Jump series cancelled before his third succeeded. Ōmagadoki Dōbutsuen ran five volumes in 2010 and Barrage two in 2012. My Hero Academia began in 2014 and ran until 2024, reaching 42 volumes and becoming one of the magazine's defining titles of the decade.
Openly borrowed influences. Horikoshi has been direct about his debt to American superhero comics, and All Might is a deliberate Superman-and-Captain-America construction. What is his own is the collision of that tradition with Jump's school-arc machinery — a superhero universe run as a vocational education system.
Costume as characterisation. His designs carry unusual information density; a hero's suit tells you their power, their taste, and often their misjudgement of themselves. He maintains distinct silhouettes across a cast of well over fifty.
Institutional critique. The later arcs argue that the hero system manufactures its own villains, and Horikoshi commits to that further than the genre usually allows, giving his antagonists origins that indict the society his protagonists serve.
The improvement in his action staging across the run is marked. Early fights are clear but static; the war arcs carry several simultaneous battles across double-page spreads without losing the reader, which is technically difficult and rarely attempted at weekly pace.
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 88 across 2 words, reducing to 7. The weight sits in “Horikoshi”, which carries 58 on its own and reduces to 4.
Seven is analyst & seeker — analysis, secrecy, and the search for truth. The reference files it as an open question. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 7's pull toward the hidden and the unresolved.
Heart's Desire 5, Personality 11: change underneath, vision on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 7; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 22, 総格 total is 38, an 11 and born is 1986, a 6. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
The 7 mistakes withholding for depth. Some works filed here are obscure because they are unfinished, not because they are deep. What the 7 still asks is that you sit with the part that was never explained. The other entries that reduce to 7 are collected on The Inquiry.