My read was more like transhumans, or maybe angels. They're more capable than human wizards, but they're still exploring, learning, trying to figure things out.
After the first wave of big, long-running shonen series in the 1980's (Dragonball, Fist of the North Star, JJBA, etc), there was a second crop of major series that started printing in the mid-to-late 90's. Naruto, Inuyasha, etc. From what I've seen of them, these second-gen shonen leviathans are characterized by being influenced by anime as much as they were by earlier manga. Of this second crop, One Piece by Oda Eiichiro has been the most successful at selling issues.
In fact, One Piece has the honour of being the best-selling manga of all time.
This manga has sort of a muddled beginning. It officially started in 1997, with its serial publication in Weekly Shonen Jump. However, the first two issues of it are just slightly modified versions of an earlier one-shot comic of Oda's and its extemporaneous sequel. And, having read the first volume of One Piece and compared these first two chapters to the six that following them, well...it shows. It really shows. The older shorts may have been given a touch-up before being rebranded as One Piece #1-2, but there's still a very noticeable difference in quality between them and everything after them.
I've also been told by quite a few people that One Piece doesn't get good until a certain arc a little ways in. While I've had people tell me "wait, it's about to get good, trust me" about quite a few series before, in THIS case all of them were in perfect consensus about when that point would come, and several of them also told me this before I had ever started reading let alone judging the first issue. So, I'm inclined to believe that One Piece becomes a much stronger work a little ways passed what I've read.
Which says something, because other than those first two chapters "Romance Dawn" ain't bad.
So, I've decided to split this review into two posts. The first will consist mostly of me tearing the first couple of issues apart. The second, looking at the One Piece-original material, will be considerably more positive in tone.
One Piece introduces itself with a background premise presented up front. Some years ago, the legendary pirate king Gold Roger was put to death, but his coveted treasure hoard, known as the "One Piece," remains safely hidden. The state was unable to extract its location from him prior to the beheading.
Since then, a veritable locust swarm of treasure-hunters have been searching the seas for a hint leading to the One Piece, and all manner of pirates and fraudsters have taken to the waters to prey on them. Essentially, all the pirate energy that was concentrated in Roger's operation has been released to create a global upwelling of piracy.
The world and setting have been...very vaguely defined...so far. Technology seems to be more-or-less eighteenth century or thereabouts, but there are some weird exceptions (people know what rockets are, apparently, and fashion includes things like T-shirts and baseball caps). The region our story starts in is "governed" by a dystopian state whose local manifestation consists entirely of tyrannical navy officers who basically rule the areas around their bases as kings (for all that volume one shows, the government these naval warlords serve might not even exist anymore). Our story begins in a forgotten little fishing village, and with this insufferable little shit:
His name is Monkey D. Luffy, and for the next seventy-some manga pages he is going to be the bane of my existence.
Luffy's backwater little town is in a vulnerable position, being far away from the mixed blessing of naval authority along a coast ridden with greedy opportunists. For now, the townsfolk have entered into a symbiotic relationship with a pirate ship let by the dashing Captain "Red-Haired" Shanks. Shanks' crew provide protection and spend a bit of their ill-gotten gains buying supplies from the villagers, and the villagers provide anchorage and secrecy. No one's quite sure how things will go once Shanks' crew move on to different waters in a year or so. Luffy wants more than anything to join the crew and leave the village along with them when the time comes, but Shanks doesn't want him because he's only like eight years old and also really annoying.
The story begins with Luffy intentionally marking himself with a knife in a failed attempt to impress the pirates. And also with him haranguing the pirates for not being tough and violent enough to please his imagination when some mountain tribesmen come by and they don't let themselves get baited into an unwise fight by the shit-talking chief. And also with him sneaking into the pirates' stuff, stealing the unique, incredibly valuable magical fruit that they just looted from an enemy ship, and eating it for dessert without telling anyone.
On one hand, he's a kid. On the other hand, that third one crosses the line into him being a thoroughly unlikeable kid. Especially when, after getting found out, he expresses zero shame or remorse, makes no attempt at an apology, and still acts the exact same way toward his people's guardians that he did before.
Luffy is initially alarmed when the magic of the "devil fruit" changes his body, turning him into something along the lines of living rubber. Once he gets the hang of it and realizes he basically has Mister Fantastic powers now, though, he gets, well...
Yeah. I'm sure Shanks and his crew are just falling more in love with this kid with every passing day. :/
The fruit's effects also come with a downside. Rubber Luffy is very resistant to injury, and able to do all kinds of stretching stunts, but he also has become strongly negatively buoyant. Drop him in water, and he'll sink like a lead weight. He already didn't know how to swim (yet another issue that Shanks kept pointing out to him when explaining why he wasn't ready for a piratical career just yet), but now he'll never be able to learn to either. He gets the nickname "Anchor" on account of this unfortunate trait.
One day, when the pirates are out at sea, those mountain raiders come back. Finding the village undefended, they decide to, well, raid it. Luffy decides he's not going to be a pussy like those worthless pirates who he still wants to join and who's priceless relic he's glad he ate. Against the instructions of every non-bandit adult in the vicinity, he picks a fight with the entire group of them. On one hand, his rubber body is pretty much unbreakable. On the other, he's not any stronger than he was before, and the mountain bandits are interested in him now.
Just as Luffy has annoyed the bandit chief into just killing him rather than selling him despite the tearful protestations of the townsfolk, the pirates come back. This time, it's too late to avoid a fight. Or, well. Maybe they *could* still avoid a fight, but letting the bandits take Luffy and probably extort supplies before leaving is too big a price to pay. Captain Shanks is probably tempted to let them have the supplies as payment for ridding him of Luffy after the devil-fruit incident, but he's too principled of a pirate for his own good.
The fight scene is...mostly lighthearted cartoon violence, except for the part where Shanks' firstmate intercepts a charging bandit by putting out his cigarette against the man's eyeball. Complete with a sizzling sound. And another panel after that one dedicated to the one-eyed man thrashing on the ground holding onto his face and screaming in agony. It's, uh, a bit of a tonal clash. And seemingly not being played for the purpose of demonstrating that Shanks' crew are brutal in battle despite their otherwise pleasantness, or for Luffy to realize what the violence he's been lusting for really looks like in practice. It's just a thing that gets a weird amount of page space devoted to it and then forgotten without anyone getting a chance to react to it and the rest of the fight just being normal shonen battle stuff again.
When the battle goes against his men, the bandit chief manages to slip away in a rowboat with Luffy as a hostage. He tosses the boy overboard once he's made his getaway, but the random encounter table ends up causing the sinking Luffy to outlive him.
Naturally, it goes for Luffy as well once it's swallowed the bandit and his rowboat in a single bite. But, apparently Captain Shanks was swimming after them this whole time. And he rescues Luffy. At the cost of his arm.
I'm not entirely sure how this rescue is supposed to have worked. Like, we see the rowboat, with the bandit kicking Luffy overboard. The giant eel eats the boat with its remaining occupant, and then starts moving toward the sinking Luffy. Then suddenly Shanks is there in the water pulling Luffy away from its clashing jaws; I assume he must have swam after them, since there's no sign of another boat, but that's really just my best guess. Then he glares at the eel and tells it to fuck off, and it...does. I guess Shanks has some kind of animal-controlling power, or something? Or maybe the last time the giant eel met him he was shooting cannons at it, and it's still afraid of him? I don't know. Anyway, the eel retreats, and then the next page includes the panel above that shows Shanks' arm missing and Luffy mysteriously not sinking even though neither of them appear to be holding onto each other.
How the hell did it get his arm without also getting Luffy?
I guess maybe Shanks is supposed to have lost the arm to the bandits before he made it out here? It does look like an awfully clean cut, like you'd expect from a sword rather than teeth. But in that case...is he supposed to have outswam the rowboat with one arm and a freshly bleeding stump?
The visual storytelling and fight choreography throughout this first issue aren't great, but this scene is uniquely baffling.
...
As a side note, the giant moray eel is an animal I have a particular affection for. They're actually smarter and have more personality than any other fish that didn't learn to breathe air, and they can even be friendly if you let them get used to you. I actually used to chill with one sometimes when I was doing a volunteer thing in the Carribean.
On one hand, if they could get that big then they probably would eat people, sure, most carnivores would. On the other hand, they get a bad enough rep as it is, and there's any number of other sea monsters the mangaka could have come up with.
...
Not too long after this, the pirates take off for good. Luffy has learned what an incredible man Shanks is, and has stopped whining about wanting to join his crew. Although, on the eve of their departure, well...make what you will of this:
While the framing of the timeskip implies that Luffy really does feel terrible about (possibly?) costing Shanks his arm, there's little sign of like. I dunno. Gratitude? Or apologies for costing him a valuable treasure in addition to his arm?
Still inexplicably fond of and charitable toward Luffy, Shanks gives him a straw hat that he tells him to keep. Which causes Luffy to fume with rage at being condescended to.
-____-
At this point, I'd be more satisfied if Shanks decided to use Luffy as a literal anchor.
Anyway, that's the end of the first issue, and the origins of Luffy's distinctive hat that he'll be wearing for the entire rest of the manga. What have we learned? Basically, that our hero is a Mary Sue among Mary Sues who the other characters and the story itself will put up with absolutely anything from and still keep on rewarding him.
I think the thing that annoys me most about this story is that Shanks is so obviously a better protagonist for us to be following. Or at least, he seems like he probably would be if it weren't for Luffy's narrative black hole pulling him into its gravity well.
Truly phenomenal.
...
The second issue starts a decade later, with Luffy as a young man ready to strike off on his own and follow his dream of being the bestest pirate ever. And, while it isn't anything in the neighbourhood of "good," this story is at least a substantial improvement over the previous. Late-teenaged Luffy rows away from his village to seek his piratical fortune, while the elders on the beach murmur darkly about how he might get their town in trouble with the navy if he does something too stupid.
On one hand, Luffy has learned how to use his Mr. Fantastic powers much more effectively by now. When that giant eel tries to get up in his business, he demonstrates this by doing a sort of catapult-punch stretching his arm back and letting it snap forward again.
I mean, I'd root for the eel against Luffy any day, but it's still kinda cool I guess.
Unfortunately, not long after this, Luffy gets pulled into a whirlpool. And he has no way of getting the boat out of it. Or of swimming. He's sort of dispassionately peeved about this.
This relates to something that'll be relevant going forward. After these first couple of issues, One Piece becomes an adventure-comedy rather than a battle-manga with a few comic elements. Maybe it eventually changes back, but for most of the first volume it's really all about the gags.
Which is probably for the best. The art style is far and away better suited for that, and Luffy's behavior becomes *much* more tolerable when its consequences are being played for laughs rather than drama.
However, this second episode is still kind of working this out. It's much more openly silly than the first, but it still hasn't quite found the right balance.
...
We now jump over to Koby, an enslaved cabin boy aboard another pirate ship. These pirates aren't of the same romanticized variety as Captain Shanks' bunch. Their schtick is that their captain, Iron-Mace Alvida, cultivates a hyperfeminine aesthetic and is obsessed with beauty and cleanliness, which means endless janitorial work for Koby. The gag accompanying this is that Alvida is really ugly, which...YMMV on the humor value of that, but I wasn't especially amused.
Granted, she's at least ugly in an intimidating way. Her crew are very rightly terrified of her, and she's self-evidently deadly with her namesake weapon. Better than the alternative.
At the moment, Alvida's ship is parked at their secret island base, where Koby and some other bottom-rung crew members are hauling the latest loot from ship to warehouse. Koby finds a barrel with something in it washed up on the beach and decides to bring it in too. Somehow, he and the other pirates think it has rum in it, despite it actually containing a living human body. Those two things don't feel, sound, or distribute their weight the same, but maybe Luffy is using his Mr. Fantastic powers to assume a semiliquid state or something. Apparently that whirlpool sucked down his boat, but not that barrel he had. Anyway, they bring it in, Luffy decides that now is the time to burst out, and um...Alvida storms into the room, thinking she heard them slacking off, and kicks everybody through the wall? I think? She's yelling at them, there's an explosion, and then everyone is scattered around the forest.
And uh. Luffy in his barrel gets launched much deeper into the woods than everything else. Except...Koby ALSO got launched further along with him, because next thing we know Alvida is yelling at all the other swabbies where they're sprawled out on the beach, and Luffy and Koby are having a private conversation out of sight in the forest.
Like I said, this mangaka really has a long way to go when it come to visual storytelling. Especially in action sequences. Like, even going on pure Loony Tunes slapstick logic, I have no idea what's supposed to have happened here.
Anyway. Luffy tells Koby who he is and what he's trying to do (ie, hope that barrel floats him to somewhere where he can get a crew and ship capable of hunting down the One Piece and making him the greatest pirate lord since Gold Roger). Koby shares his own dream of joining the navy and fighting pirates; his experience as an unwilling member of Alvida's crew has understandably given him a dim view of pirates and a rosy view of the so-called navy. Also, Koby's backstory is almost as embarrassing as Luffy's, and Luffy is a prick about it even though he's in the same tier.
I'm pretty sure Koby is also like...12 years old to Luffy's 17 or so. So uh, yeah. I still want Luffy to be used as a literal ship anchor.
Luffy's courage and audacity (even if they're stupid courage and audacity) inspire Koby to try and improve his life or die trying just like Luffy is doing. So, when Alvida finds them and makes to beat Koby up for not working, he defies her. And this, in turn, earns Luffy's respect. So Luffy punches Alvida in the face with his anti-seamonster rubber punch, putting her in a coma. Granted, she also did try to kill Luffy with her big mace for being unfamiliar and suspicious, so that was also part of Luffy's motivation.
The pirate are sufficiently intimidated that they happily give the two boys a dinghy and send them along their way to the nearest naval fiefdom. Koby, hoping to enlist. Luffy, hoping to rescue and recruit a notorious bounty hunter who's reportedly run afoul of the law and is being held there.
Koby and Luffy recognize that if they do succeed at becoming a marine and a pirate, respectively, they'll be enemies. Potentially deadly enemies. But, for now, there's some mutual respect along with the mutual destination. The sequel hook in the last few panels, I assume, was retroactively added to the "One Piece" version of this second standalone Luffy story.
Like I said, the second issue is a substantial improvement over the first (it's also much shorter, but I don't know if that's causative). It still has a lot of the same issues, with the unlikeable protag who the narrative goes out of its way for, and the obtuse action sequences, but it doesn't have them as badly. The much more overt humorous elements, meanwhile, give the work a draw that it lacked in the beginning, though not quite enough of one at least for me.
When I said that the art style of this era of shonen manga was anime-influenced, well, I think you can see what I mean. The superdeformed style and chaotic action pieces look like they'd work much better in an animated medium, and I strongly suspect that the visual problems come from the author not yet understanding the strengths and limitations of the comic vs the video.
To be clear, this is not remotely a condemnation of Eichiro Oda as an artist. I think he was still in his teens (or very early twenties at most) when he drew the original versions of these stories. As you'll see in my next post, he improved significantly in the couple of years that passed between finishing these and starting One Piece as a serial. I can only assume that he's improved even more significantly over the decades of practice since completing the material that constitutes Volume One. Everyone has to start somewhere.
It's always fascinating seeing those early chapters when a mangaka has just got published for the first time, where the amateur nature of their work is still clear, and then tracking the way their art improves and/or changes over the course of the story. You see it in JJBA, in One Piece, in Tokyo Ghoul...
Just goes to show you don't have to be a great artist to do comics, really, but that continual effort and practise will genuinely improve your ability to produce art.
Also Luffy is one of the reasons I haven't caught up on One Piece, he's just... very irritating. The other is that it's way too fucking long.
You might want to try out the live action version then. They did a great job of making Luffy's good traits stand out immediately from the beginning while removing his most annoying ones (something they did with nearly every character, by the way), and they condense the first 95 chapters of the manga into just eight 1-hour episodes. I personally prefers the manga, but the live action is hands down the best and fastest way to get into the series.
Before I say anything else: you would not believe how hard it was to write commentary without spoiling anything. As a writer, Oda is in love with making callbacks to events that happened years or decades prior, in publishing time. Makes for some great moments as a reader, but in this case just leaves me frustrated you have concerns about things that don't get paid off until hundreds of chapters later.
The world and setting have been...very vaguely defined...so far. Technology seems to be more-or-less eighteenth century or thereabouts, but there are some weird exceptions (people know what rockets are, apparently, and fashion includes things like T-shirts and baseball caps). The region our story starts in is "governed" by a dystopian state whose local manifestation consists entirely of tyrannical navy officers who basically rule the areas around their bases as kings (for all that volume one shows, the government these naval warlords serve might not even exist anymore). Our story begins in a forgotten little fishing village, and with this insufferable little shit:
Fun fact: rockets did exist in the 18th century! The Kingdom of Mysore in India straight-up invented metal-cylinder rockets in the 1780s and the Brits stole the technology to use in the Napoleonic Wars.
Like I said, this mangaka really has a long way to go when it come to visual storytelling. Especially in action sequences. Like, even going on pure Loony Tunes slapstick logic, I have no idea what's supposed to have happened here.
To be clear, this is not remotely a condemnation of Eichiro Oda as an artist. I think he was still in his teens (or very early twenties at most) when he drew the original versions of these stories. As you'll see in my next post, he improved significantly in the couple of years that passed between finishing these and starting One Piece as a serial. I can only assume that he's improved even more significantly over the decades of practice since completing the material that constitutes Volume One. Everyone has to start somewhere.
Oda was 22 years old when the first chapters of One Piece were published. He'd started drawing manga at 17, which landed him an assistant job working for other mangaka, notably Nobuhiro Watsuki of Rurouni Kenshin fame. He won awards for his early art!
But as you may guess, it's one thing to do panel work and character designs, it's another to draw dynamic action, especially in the Dragon Ball style popularized by Akira Toriyama. So yeah, you've pretty much nailed it.
Stylistically, yes, Oda was very much inspired by anime rather than manga. While Dragon Ball and Kinnikuman were of course major influences from his childhood, his third influence was Vicky the Viking, a 70s anime based on a Swedish children's book. It's generally agreed that's where the whole pirate thing comes from.
You might want to try out the live action version then. They did a great job of making Luffy's good traits stand out immediately from the beginning while removing his most annoying ones (something they did with nearly every character, by the way), and they condense the first 95 chapters of the manga into just eight 1-hour episodes. I personally prefers the manga, but the live action is hands down the best and fastest way to get into the series.
I said catch up because I've read up to a couple of arcs after The Big Midway Point, but I burned out on One Piece because that's still like 600+ chapters in. It's a very long work.
Before I say anything else: you would not believe how hard it was to write commentary without spoiling anything. As a writer, Oda is in love with making callbacks to events that happened years or decades prior, in publishing time. Makes for some great moments as a reader, but in this case just leaves me frustrated you have concerns about things that don't get paid off until hundreds of chapters later.
Fun fact: rockets did exist in the 18th century! The Kingdom of Mysore in India straight-up invented metal-cylinder rockets in the 1780s and the Brits stole the technology to use in the Napoleonic Wars.
DERP. Forgot about gunpowder rockets. Those actually existed long before the 18th century (pretty sure the Chinese had them in the 1500's if not before), so yeah, Luffy knowing what they are doesn't suggest a temporally mixed setting at all.
Heh, I really thought people would go for the Netflix show first. Anyway, hope you enjoy it. I didn't find kid Luffy as annoying as you're finding him but I recognize how someone would find him like that.
The pirate are sufficiently intimidated that they happily give the two boys a dinghy and send them along their way to the nearest naval fiefdom. Koby, hoping to enlist. Luffy, hoping to rescue and recruit a notorious bounty hunter who's reportedly run afoul of the law and is being held there.
This is actually supposed to be 'Zoro', not 'Zolo', but I think there were legal issues with the english translation using that name.
As a more general comment, I will say that the anime does these first few scenes a lot better- largely because it adds and tweaks quite a few of the details. It's still not perfect, but it is definitely an improvement. The anime also has one of most memorable openings ever, whether you're watching the original japanese:
And also with him sneaking into the pirates' stuff, stealing the unique, incredibly valuable magical fruit that they just looted from an enemy ship, and eating it for dessert without telling anyone.
Right, meant to comment on this: pretty sure he didn't sneak into their stuff and steal it, it was right there. The anime actually changed things a little to make that clearer: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH5nicPRmms
Though whether that was indeed Oda's original intention, I don't know. I assume so.
I mean, it wasn't that hard - the first portion of the East Blue is the weakest part of One Piece as a whole, easily, and the part where "it gets good", as is commonly agreed upon, is the part they used for the first live action season's climax (episodes 7 and 8). So, when they had already the shift in quality for the ending as a reference point to aim towards, rearranging the parts leading up to it was probably not that difficult.
Speaking of which, @Leila Hann, how was the "it gets good at this point" part identified to you? Were you given volume numbers, chapter numbers, or sort-of-spoilery names and locations?
Also, I wanted to comment on something I noticed on a re-read:
I'm pretty sure that panel, which has Luffy crying, is intended to show that he's actually moved at Shanks finally providing him with a tangible acknowledgment that he accepts his dream/ambition as something he can achieve; at the very least, that's how the scene was adapted in both the anime and the live-action version. What made you read it as rage and condescension? It seems like a very strange reading, so I am sort of curious as to how it came to be.
One Piece's first couple of arc are rough, yeah. It improves rapidly after this, but still takes until Arlong Park to become the One Piece that people think of when they talk about the show.
Anyway, that's the end of the first issue, and the origins of Luffy's distinctive hat that he'll be wearing for the entire rest of the manga. What have we learned? Basically, that our hero is a Mary Sue among Mary Sues who the other characters and the story itself will put up with absolutely anything from and still keep on rewarding him.
This may just be me but I feel like this is a (haha) stretch. Luffy is introduced as a very thoughtless individual (on top of being a child) but I see Shanks and his crew's behavior towards him as something they'd do in general for just about any snot-nosed brat they took a liking to. They humor him and laugh with/at him, they share stories, and they protect him from actual harm.
Ultimately, Shanks' crew is a very romanticized view of what pirates should be like, despite the first chapter openly talking about hostage-taking, pillaging and featuring murder.
We now jump over to Koby, an enslaved cabin boy aboard another pirate ship. These pirates aren't of the same romanticized variety as Captain Shanks' bunch. Their schtick is that their captain, Iron-Mace Alvida, cultivates a hyperfeminine aesthetic and is obsessed with beauty and cleanliness, which means endless janitorial work for Koby. The gag accompanying this is that Alvida is really ugly, which...YMMV on the humor value of that, but I wasn't especially amused.
Alvida is not exactly Oda's finest writing/drawing moment.
There's... a lot of other stuff I want to comment on, but I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut because there's too much. Even if you didn't have a strict no-spoilers policy (and you do), One Piece has been around for so long that trying to explain one thing just leads to trying to explain another thing and so on and so forth until someone gets tired of it all. Read it at your own pace.
There's... a lot of other stuff I want to comment on, but I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut because there's too much. Even if you didn't have a strict no-spoilers policy (and you do), One Piece has been around for so long that trying to explain one thing just leads to trying to explain another thing and so on and so forth until someone gets tired of it all. Read it at your own pace.
Not to mention the norms of what counts as a joke has changed over the last quarter century of it running, so some things that were jokes at the time may seem a bit uncomfortable after all that time.
I mean, it wasn't that hard - the first portion of the East Blue is the weakest part of One Piece as a whole, easily, and the part where "it gets good", as is commonly agreed upon, is the part they used for the first live action season's climax (episodes 7 and 8). So, when they had already the shift in quality for the ending as a reference point to aim towards, rearranging the parts leading up to it was probably not that difficult.
Speaking of which, @Leila Hann, how was the "it gets good at this point" part identified to you? Were you given volume numbers, chapter numbers, or sort-of-spoilery names and locations?
Also, I wanted to comment on something I noticed on a re-read:
I'm pretty sure that panel, which has Luffy crying, is intended to show that he's actually moved at Shanks finally providing him with a tangible acknowledgment that he accepts his dream/ambition as something he can achieve; at the very least, that's how the scene was adapted in both the anime and the live-action version. What made you read it as rage and condescension? It seems like a very strange reading, so I am sort of curious as to how it came to be.
I guess it's a quirk of the artstyle that's keeping it from coming across, then; that's just how Oda tends to draw people who are crying/struggling to contain their emotions.
The third episode opens on Luffy and Koby arriving at the (unnamed?) city where the local navy despot holds court in this Dr. Seuss mushroom trip fortress:
While this citadel is surely very effective at warding off marauding pirates and those rotten butter-side-down zooks alike, the local townsfolk aren't any les jumpy for it. Just saying the name of a politically or militarily relevant figure is liable to send everyone within earshot darting behind the nearest piece of furniture in a blind panic like roaches when you turn the light on. In particular, the name of the local overlord Captain Morgan has the locals hiding under their desks with head in hands. Only slightly less terrifying is the name of Roronoa Zolo, the allegedly demon-possessed bounty hunter who's supposed to currently be imprisoned by Morgan.
Our initial (and main? sort of?) antagonist for this story is neither the bossman nor his prisoner, though. It's this guy:
His name is Helmeppo Morgan, he looks 30, and he acts 3. I'm not sure if the author named him after the hair he gave him, or if he made up the hairdo to fit the name. Apparently, Helmeppo had the legendary heroic bounty hunter Zolo arrested for the crime of stopping Helmeppo's dog from terrorizing the townsfolk when he let it off its leash. Zolo is due to be executed, but Helmeppo has promised to let him off the hook if he can survive for an entire month tied up in the sun without food or water. Zolo is currently on day 9, and fully intends to make it to 31.
Helmeppo might not be the most intimidating villain ever. However, his father - Captain Morgan the actual power-holder who does anything Helmeppo asks him to without thinking about it - looks like this:
I really want to know what the hell the mother looked like, if mixing her with the above somehow resulted in the previous above. Berserk + ??? = ONE.
...
There's an author's note explaining that he designed Helmeppo first and then had to work from there to come up with a design that both a) could be an intimidating baddy and b) looked anything even remotely like him. It took a long time and involved a lot of input from peers, apparently.
...
For his own part, Captain Morgan seems to be sucking his fiefdom dry to raise the funds for giant statues of himself. Why does he want them? Because he's great. Why is he great? Because he's in charge. How did he end up in charge? Because of his greatness. His son gets every stupid, counterproductive thing he wants because he is his son, and him not getting everything all the time would compromise the public perception of Morgan's own greatness. Helmeppo having hobbies like "letting his dog bite people" and "walking around bullying children" do not in and of themselves compromise his greatness, unless he were to fail in these recreational endeavors.
I love that the marines' uniforms are a wife-beater and ballcap that say "marine" on them.
Captain Morgan firmly believes that his way of life is the purest realization of the navy's sacred ethos. He may or may not be correct about this; like I said, I don't know how much of a unified authority the navy even has at this point, let alone if there's an actual government somewhere far away that it theoretically serves.
Anyway, this is about the level of silliness that One Piece: Romance Dawn is going to stay at from this point onward. It's definitely for the best.
For his own part, Zolo the maybe-demonic bounty hunter seems like an okay guy. Scary, but okay.
Easy enough to side with him over the Morgan Dynasty. Unfortunately, when he sneaks into the base's courtyard to check it out, Luffy makes the mistake of telling Zolo that he's an aspiring pirate. Zolo's hatred of pirates is sufficient that he's not even willing to be rescued by one, and makes it clear that he'll have to come after Luffy and all others like him the minute that he's free. Still, Luffy decides that if he gets Zolo's swords for him out of the base's lockup and then offers him his freedom AND his prized possessions, he'll probably be able to change his mind. Despite Zolo's insistence to the contrary.
While Luffy is using his Mr. Fantastic powers to sneak further into the base, Koby is having a crisis of conscience. This isn't the navy he spent his childhood being told about. It couldn't possibly be. The navy protects people from pirates, but these people are even worse than the pirates Koby was enslaved by. This must be a rogue cell. A deserter legion. Something like that. It must be. Things come to a head when Luffy ends up accidentally knocking over the giant statue that Morgan was just having his men raise, smashing it and provoking a doggedly lethal response.
In the end, Luffy manages to get the swords, and when Captain Morgan (whose oversized axe-arm might be sharp and strong enough to actually hurt Luffy) cuts him off in the courtyard Koby makes his decision and unties Zolo.
Apparently, Zolo is a master of the "three blade" style.
Pretty sure they were only able to arrest him in the first place because he chose not to resist.
Not what I thought he was going to do, going by the wording, but the alternative would have been hard to get away with in a shonen manga. Anyway, Zolo is deadly enough with his mouth-fencing that he's able to wipe out Morgan and his goons with only minimal help from Luffy. Once Morgan is dead, his men quickly lose interest in continuing to fight. Zolo decides he'll join Luffy after all, since he owes him his life and he seems to be a lot better than "pirates" typically are. Koby, for his part, is able to latch onto the delusion that the navy is a good organization, and this particular base just had bad leadership. He'll be parting ways with Luffy here, and hopefully they won't have to fight each other in person in the future. Luffy even uses a (surprisingly, coming from him) clever trick to get Koby to convincingly denounce him, so that his association with an aspiring pirate king doesn't damage his navy career.
Koby enlists. And, uh, well, Captain Morgan was an outlier, but as I suspected he isn't that much of an outlier.
The volume finishes off with two more little stories. One of them being a flashback to bounty-hunter Zolo's childhood, the other being the beginning of the next arc that I assume continues into volume 2.
The former ends up being bit more serious in tone than the surrounding material. And also refreshingly progressive for a shonen manga of this vintage. As a boy, Zolo was the second-best student in his dojo. His pride was stung by the fact that the only student who could outfight him was a girl. And also that she was kind of an overbearing bully, but mostly it was because she was a girl.
Eventually, the two of them had a verbal confrontation in private that turned into a heart-to-heart. It turned out that the reason she was so overbearing was because she knew that they'd all be going through puberty soon, and that she would most likely become smaller and weaker than most (if not all) of her peers. No matter how skilled she is, biology might just tip the scales against her, and if it does there's nothing she can do about it.
Zolo realized how myopic he'd been, and the two apologized for how they'd acted toward each other. They made a solemn vow, on that day, that at least one of them would become the world's greatest swordsperson someday.
The girl died in an accident less than a year later. Since then, Zolo has taken it upon himself to be the world's sword champion in her name. If she wasn't given the chance, then he HAS to make sure he does it. He's a grown man now, seemingly at least in his mid twenties, and he hasn't given up the goal.
...
So, all three of the main characters introduced thus far are motivated by the desire to be the best at something. Luffy wants to be the best pirate captain, largely due to his hero worship of the one pirate captain he knew as a child (and, implicitly, how that interplayed with the preexisting legend of Gold Rogers and the One Piece that every kid seems to grow up hearing about). Zolo wants to be the best swordsman, as he owes it to a childhood friend who had everything stacked against her and then died before she had a chance to maybe persevere despite that. Koby wants to be the best pirate-slayer ever, on account of his experiences under Alvida (though that conviction of his may or may not survive his next little while within the navy).
Nothing out of the ordinary for shonen - heck, a good two-thirds of shonen protagonists have "I wanna be the guy" as their primary motive - but here it's being done in clear parallel and using these characters to mirror each other in a potentially interesting way.
Like I mentioned before, this is also a way, way more sensitive handling of gender politics than I'd expect from a nineties shonen comedy piece. I remember hearing somewhere that One Piece also gets some decent-ish trans representation later on. With this early data point in mind, that certainly fits.
...
The final chapter of the volume starts with Luffy and new party member Zolo having a new mishap at sea. Turns out that Kobi was the only one of the three who actually knows how to sail, and they left him behind. Luffy and Zolo both assumed the other one knew what they were doing lol. A strong current and a random encounter with a dire seagull sees the two of them separated. They then, individually, stumble their ways into an ongoing conflict between the clown-themed pirate crew of Captain Buggy, and a cunning young sneak-thief named Nami who is after their loot.
Nami's name is a familiar one to me. Specifically, I have probably stumbled into more porn of her than any other character from any other anime or manga series. Before I knew anything else about One Piece, I knew that the entire internet wanted to bang Nami.
Either Luffy is tiny for his age, or those pirates are 9 feet tall. Maybe I was wrong about Koby being younger, and
protagonists in this comic are just tiny for some reason?
So far she just seems pretty archetypical to me, but she's only just been introduced, so. Anyway, Nami also demonstrates some keen helmsmanship in her one-woman operation against Buggy the Clown, so odds are she's going to end up being recruited as Luffy's navigator by the end of the arc. This volume doesn't get far enough into it for me to say much more on the subject, but so far it's at least as entertaining as the caper with Captain Morgan's group that preceded it.
...
There are other touches throughout the comic that endeared me to it. For instance, between some of the chapters there are little omakes containing illustrated trivia about real life pirate history, notes on character and setting design for the comic, and - most amusingly of all - a series of little instructional bits about how to draw the Jolly Roger and invent your own variations of it.
Aside from being cute, the way these bonus bits are written definitely give me the impression that One Piece is aimed younger than some other shonen manga. "Shonen" is a target demographic that includes boys from around age 11 to around age 18, and One Piece seems to mostly have the 11 year old and directly adjacent subgroups in mind.
I wonder if maybe that was part of the problem with the first two episodes. The author wasn't yet sure if he wanted to appeal more to kids, or to teenagers. Since then, the comic has been more uniformly silly, embraced the superdeformed art style more thoroughly, and featured violence that's either bloodless slapstick or over very quickly (nothing even remotely close to the cigarette eye-burning from chapter one has happened since then, even when the opportunities for it were clear). I don't know if One Piece remains aimed more at younger shonen readers for the rest of its very long run. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But for the latter two thirds of "Romance Dawn," the work benefits a lot from knowing what it wants to do.
Anyway, that's One Piece: Volume One. Very weak start, but a promising trajectory. As I said in the previous post, there's a certain point after this when most fans agree that it really starts getting good, and from the trend I've seen within this volume I'm inclined to believe them.
I also wonder how the art changes later in the run. While the superdeformity is intentional, some details make me think that the mankaga also just wasn't very good at drawing yet regardless of stylistic choices. I've seen some shots from the anime, presumably adapted from the later volumes, and it definitely looked a lot more polished, but I'd be interested to see how the manga drawings themselves improved over time as I assume they did.
Yeah, One Piece is quality work, but good lord is it a big investment to get the whole story, because Oda is a madlad who likes dropping little hints in during periods that you think aren't a big deal that don't make sense and then later on you go "Oh... Oh, that's why he did that" hundreds--if not thousands--of chapters later.
The Live Action's better about that, because it benefits from being a condensed version of the East Blue arc that gets the major hints and points down but only takes 8 episodes to get there instead of nearly a hundred chapters.
The Live Action's better about that, because it benefits from being a condensed version of the East Blue arc that gets the major hints and points down but only takes 8 episodes to get there instead of nearly a hundred chapters.
Also clarifies a few very subtle things and adds a few more bits of foreshadowing to tie things together a bit clearer with a few names dropped earlier than in the manga.
Fun fact about One Piece: 4kids got ahold of the original dubbing rights for the anime when it was originally released, and they edited it in the most bizarre and unintentionally hilarious ways possible to make it 'child friendly'. For example, this is what they did to one of the scenes from the volume just covered:
