A 135-Year-Old Kyoto Workshop Carves the Final Battle
According to Japanese entertainment news outlet Oricon News, the prints come from Takezasado, a Kyoto woodblock printing workshop founded in 1891 that still practices the same ukiyo-e techniques that flourished in the Edo period. Rather than tracing existing anime art, the workshop drew completely original designs for the project and cut new blocks from scratch, then rebuilt each character's energy in the distinctive lines and colors of woodblock printing.
The craft specs are genuinely intense. Oricon describes carving that uses lines as thin as 1 millimeter to fix each character's personality into the wood, and a printing stage where layers of vivid color have to land without the slightest misalignment. Every finished print is the work of two artisans, a carver and a printer, working in dialogue.
Kenji Takenaka (竹中健司), Takezasado's fifth-generation printer, put the project in terms any My Hero Academia fan will recognize. "We didn't invent woodblock printing," he said in the announcement. "We simply inherited what has existed since long ago, and my role is to connect what was passed down."
Warrior Prints Were the Shonen Manga of the Edo Period
Oricon frames the pairing with a fun bit of art history: ukiyo-e prints originally functioned as media, recording the culture and enthusiasms of their era for later generations. The musha-e warrior prints that Edo-period audiences went wild for filled roughly the same cultural slot that shonen manga does today. Deku mid-punch in full ukiyo-e linework is less of a stretch than it sounds.
The collaboration is the first release from CRAFTALE, a new brand from Japanese company HIKE that pairs traditional Japanese craftsmanship with anime, manga, and game properties. According to the announcement, My Hero Academia was chosen because the theme running through the series, inheritance across generations, mirrors how workshops like Takezasado have kept their techniques alive by handing them from artisan to artisan. For a story built on a power passed from one hero to the next, a 135-year-old family workshop is about as on-theme as collaborators get. The team regards the anime as contemporary culture worth preserving for the future, and the prints are built to match: each one comes framed, with a certificate of authenticity, in a finish meant to survive as an art piece for generations.
Looking Ahead
All three prints, one each for Izuku Midoriya, Katsuki Bakugo, and Shoto Todoroki, go on sale Friday, July 31, 2026 at 7:00 p.m. Japan time through an official web store and a small number of physical shops. Each runs ¥55,000 (about $370), tax included, and sales close once the planned production run is gone. The Oricon News report doesn't mention international shipping, so overseas collectors will want to check the sales page when orders open. And since this is billed as CRAFTALE's first release, more craft-meets-anime projects appear likely to follow.