Short-Term Focused Cover Page Serials (短期集中表紙連載,Tanki Shūchū Hyōshi Rensai?), usually shortened to Cover Stories or Cover Arcs, are a series of supplemental stories told through the cover pages of select chapters. With few exceptions, they focus on the activities of various antagonists and side-characters after their initial encounters with the Straw Hat Pirates.
Though easily overlooked, cover arcs are as canonical as the manga proper, many having introduced or explained elements pivotal to the main storyline—e.g.Vice AdmiralGarp.
(It should be noted that, despite similar—sometimes identical—construction, cover arcs are distinct from the Where They Are Now series, which follow a different numbering.)
Cover arcs follow a simpler, more disjointed storytelling format than the manga proper; their pages are never subdivided into panels, and their few speech bubbles always use pictograms or simple words in English. Each installment delivers its main dialogue and narration in a page-bottom caption (which is preceded by the particular installment's part-number).
Unlike the "main" story arcs, each cover arc has an official title, typically printed on every installment except the first (which instead counts off the total number of cover arcs serialized thus far). Taking advantage of this, most cover arcs keep their protagonists obscured—or outright hidden—in the first installment, effectively challenging readers to predict their identity from context clues.
Cover arcs are always printed in black-and-white, never color; on weeks Shonen Jump runs One Piece as a color feature, any ongoing cover arc will be interrupted by a color spread.
Complete Listing[]
By Eiichiro Oda's official count, there have been 26 cover arcs thus far.
Following their separation after the battle at Sabaody Archipelago, the other members of the Straw Hat Pirates begin their own separate adventures in their new surroundings.
After escaping Totto Land, the Fire Tank Pirates set out on a quest to find Lola, which results in long-awaited family reunions and an unlikely wedding.
Despite their Canonical status, the majority of cover stories have not been adapted by the anime, and the existing adaptations have received widely varying treatments:
Apart from these, the anime has faithfully adapted the cover stories' aftereffects whenever they appear in the main storyline —e.g.Hatchan returning in the Sabaody Archipelago Arc as a civilian chef—but never the stories themselves. At most, elements introduced by cover stories are given brief cameos, or else repurposed for anime-original material.
VIZ Media's translations of cover arcs are generally looser and less standardized than the main storyline. Notably, the very first installment was removed of all text and treated as a standard Animal Theater page, while other arcs were often subjected to different translations across different installments:
"Diary of Koby-Meppo" was variously translated as Koby and Helmeppo's Chronicle of Toil or The Travails of Koby and Helmeppo
The overall format has been variously translated as Short-Term Concentrated Cover Serial, Short-Term Cover Series, Chapter Title Page Series, Limited-Run Series and others.
Merchandise[]
Outside the standard manga volumes, several sources have been dedicated to compiling cover arcs:
Several years after, these cards were included as bonus unlockables in Grand Battle! 2.
The first four databooks (which always resize the installments to fit two, three, or even four to a page, and add extra narration from the protagonists' perspective):
Most recently, the One Piece Doors! collections have reprinted them all at full (tankoban) size, alongside all the manga's non-color cover pages.
Trivia[]
Currently, "From the Decks of the World" stands as the longest cover story overall, at 48 installments. "Caribou's Kehihihihi in the New World" stands as the longest with a single protagonist and plot, at 46.
Discounting the Straw Hat Separation Serial, "Wapol's Omnivorous Hurrah" is the shortest, at 23 installments.
References[]
↑One Piece Collection (French fansite) on the Visual Adventure series, with full galleries.
