One Piece (Manga)

One Piece (ワンピース) is an epic pirate adventure manga written and drawn by Eiichiro Oda, created in August 1997. The manga is known to employ colorful and creative motifs that are taken from classic mythology, politics and musical aspects. It is also mixed with pirate lore and shonen formula.

History
Eiichiro Oda was inspired by Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump at a young age. As a child he was inspired by Vikings and he aspired to become a manga artist. Later he created Pandaman for Yudetamago's Kinnikuman. In 1992, Oda at the age of 17, submitted the manga called Wanted. This got him notice to join the staff at the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, where he became an assistant under several established manga writers including Shinobu Kaitani, Masaya Tokuhiro and finally Nobuhiro Watsuki.

Oda had interest in making a pirate manga both from his obsession with vikings as a youth and inspired by various pirate events including the discovery of the pirate ship of Edward Teach (known by his pirate name of Blackbeard). He wrote two seperate one-shots in the mid-1990s, both of which were called "Romance Dawn". The stories introduced Monkey D. Luffy, a straw-hat wearing boy who set out to sea to become a legendary pirate. Several concepts of the eventual serialization appeared in these stories, including Luffy's inspiration for being a pirate and a mysterious power he gained from eating a special fruit that turned his body into rubber. (a prototype for the Devil Fruit)

In Aug. 1997 Oda took many of his "Romance Dawn" ideas and started using them in a weekly serial under the title "One Piece". It was first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, the weekly shonen magazine owned by Shueisha. The series quickly caught on and became popular from the initial chapters on, establishing itself as one of the premiere manga series in the magazine.

Originally, Oda wanted his series to run for 5 years (meaning One Piece could have ended in 2002) But he went longer than expected and has no idea how many more years his story will be.

Plot
One Piece is the story of a boy named Monkey D. Luffy who was inspired by Red-Haired Shanks, a pirate. At the start of the series, 22 years from the present timeline, 1500 AOS a pirate named Gold Roger, known as the Pirate King was executed, but before his death, he told the crowd of his treasure, "One Piece". His death sparked what would become the Golden Age of Pirates as countless pirates set out to look for his treasure. Luffy becomes one as well, desiring to be the next Pirate King and sets out to gather crewmates and begin his adventures.

One Piece has since spanned across more than a simple pirating tale. Through the years of its serialization, One Piece has taken vastly differing directions in its storyline, at time wavering off the initial focus of the pursuit of becoming Pirate King. One Piece also has been noted to include many themes such as what treasure is, the meaning of justice and the concept of chasing ones dreams.

Style
One Piece has become known for its complex storyline, bizarre characters, battle mixtures, character development, many plot twists, comedic tones as well as emotional drama, and unique sub-plots.

At the time of its release, the dot-eyed style of artwork seen in animes like Dragonball was becoming less popular and manga and anime seemed to be moving over for the more popular big-eyes style of drawing, made famous by shows like Sailor Moon. Eiichiro Oda was fully aware of the change of art style and was worried early on in its run that his style would put off people from reading his manga. As time progressed and One Piece's popularity grew, Oda was able to relax the style more, resulting in One Piece's drawing style becoming much more loose and kinetic.

As well as its unusual art style, the style of weird drawn characters had been another worry of Oda. Another problem at the time of early production was that the Bishie was becoming a popular form of manga character depiction and "ugly" or "weird" characters manga were becoming signifcantly harder to sell. However, these character designs have since become one of One Piece's selling points, allowing more eccentric characters to be drawn.

Reception
One Piece has the highest total manga sales within Japan, and is currently Weekly Shōnen Jump's most acclaimed and all-time best-selling title. The manga is the first to increase the sales of Weekly Shōnen Jump in eleven years. As of volume 46, the series has sold over 140,000,000 copies domestically and is the fastest manga to reach sales of 100,000,000.
 * 2008: One Piece was the best selling manga in Japan with 5,956,540 volumes sold. Volume 49 with 1,544,000 copies was in fourth place, Volume 50 with 1,678,208 copies hold the first place and Volume 51 with 1,646,978 copies was in second place.
 * 2009: One Piece was the best selling manga series in Japan with 14,721,241 volumes sold. Volume 53 hold the first place with 2,057,528 copies sold, volumes 54, 52 and 55 places second, third and fourth respectively with 1,963,696, 1,952,551 and 1,810,410 copies sold respectively.
 * 2010: Volume 57 holds a manga initial circulation record in Japan with 3 million copies printed before the volume released and and the fastest manga to sell 2 millions copies only in the second week; as of volume 57 Shueisha publish 185.6 million volumes of One Piece.

Trivia

 * The original plan Oda set out for One Piece was for it to last for 5 years (meaning it would have ended in 2002).
 * The title "One Piece" has a secret meaning that only Oda knows.
 * It takes Oda 3 days to sketch out each panel of the manga and 3 days to finalise each picture.

Related pages

 * Chapters and Volumes
 * Eiichiro Oda
 * Colorwalks and Colorspreads
 * SBS
 * Popularity Polls
 * One Piece Omake
 * Name Variants
 * Trivia Pages
 * Interviews
 * One Piece Databooks
 * Story Arcs