VIZ Media

VIZ Media, LLC, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is a major American anime, manga and Japanese entertainment company formed by the merger of VIZ, LLC, and ShoPro Entertainment. The company is commonly referred to as "Viz", the same name used in previous incarnations of VIZ LLC.

Viz also produces a manga and anime review magazine, Animerica; as well as an English language version of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump (shōnen manga) magazine, and formerly a shōjo manga monthly called Shojo Beat which has recently been discontinued.

It formerly published Animerica Extra, a monthly manga anthology (which was converted to shōjo partway through its run), and PULP magazine, an adult-oriented monthly manga anthology that featured story lines inappropriate for younger readers, though not pornography (see seinen, josei).

It is jointly-owned by Japanese publishers Shogakukan and Shueisha, and licensing house Shogakukan Productions (ShoPro), a Shogakukan subsidiary.

One Piece
Viz's English adaption of the manga is, for the most part, accurate to the original Japanese version. However, they do occasionaly use some of the 4Kids dub names. For example, while they called Zoro by his original name early on, they later changed it to "Zolo" after the 4Kids dub aired. It is unknown why this change was made, but it could have possibly been due to copyright reasons. Other examples of the 4Kids names being used include Cocoyashi Village to "Coco Village" and Loguetown to "Rogue Town". However, names of characters such as Smoker and Ace are kept (as opposed to "Chaser" and "Trace").

However, despite the use of some 4Kids names and the usual omission of swear words, violence, alcohol and tobacco usage, Japanese cultural references, religious references, suggestive humor, and death remain intact.

On July 3, 2009, Viz Media announced that they will be speeding-up the release of the manga, with volumes 24 to 53 being released throughout the first half of 2010 at a rate of 5 volumes per month. In addition to the speed-up, they have also been publishing the Impel Down arc in the American Shonen Jump magazine.

Viz have also recently been re-releasing older volumes in an Omnibus format with three volumes per Omnibus. Already the first omnibus with Volumes 1-3 have been released as of December 1st 2009, with three more in the works that contain up to volume 12.