Category: One Piece Every Day

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 3

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

In today’s chapter, Koby successfully navigates Luffy’s ship to a navy town, a feat that astonishes the young pirate. The fact that Luffy apparently expected to become King of the Pirates by just aimlessly drifting from place to place is pretty great.

More importantly, we meet a couple people here. Chiefly there’s Roronoa Zolo, the tough-as-nails bounty hunter mentioned who was mentioned in the last issue and is currently taking up the banner image for the first but probably not last time. Luffy ponders trying to get him to join his crew, while Koby reveals that he has extremely simplistic views on rehabilitative justice.

Like everyone else we’ve met in One Piece so far, he’s a classic archetype; the bounty hunter with a heart of gold. Everyone in town is terrified of him, to the point that Luffy just mentioning him causes a ruckus at a local tavern. (The same happens when he mentions the “Captain Morgan” who apparently runs the whole place, but we don’t meet him yet here.)

But when we actually meet him a bit later, it becomes obvious that he has a soft center. He has an old school “tough guy / cute little kid” friendship with a local girl, who comes to bring him food and talk to him while he’s serving his sentence of being tied to a post in the prison yard. That friendship arouses the displeasure of one of the local bigshots; the other character we meet in this chapter.

Honestly, “mean, privileged rich guy” is almost cheating when it comes to creating antagonistic characters. Doubly so when their privilege is inherited and they threaten to “tell daddy” when something goes wrong, both of which are true of Helmeppo. Triply so when they’re also such a vile motherfucker that they’re mean to kids, which Helmeppo also is. (Not content with making a guard escort the little girl out of the prison, he smashes her rice balls into the ground! What a dick!)

It very briefly looks like Helmeppo might at least have a sense of fair play; he’s been telling Zolo that if he can survive for a month tied to that post, he’ll be free to go. But, shocker, at the end of the chapter we learn that that’s not actually true, and he’s planning to have the bounty hunter executed in three days. Upon learning this, Luffy delivers on his apparently once-per-chapter obligation to sock a bad guy directly in the face.

Helmeppo’s bloody-mouthed quip about “making an enemy of the navy” is where the chapter ends, setting us up with a thrilling cliffhanger for next time.

I haven’t really been mentioning the after-chapter bonus pages up ’til now, because I’m not terribly clear on if they were part of the original print run or were added at a later date in a rerelease. (Allusion to “Luffy’s Flag”, which hasn’t shown up yet, makes me think the latter.) I’m mentioning this one, though, because it’s a cute little drawing exercise—the sort of thing that really drives home just exactly how young One Piece‘s target audience is, or at least initially was—and I thought y’all might potentially be interested.

I gave it a quick go myself. I admit; I’m not much of a visual artist. But I think for doodling it in Paint.NET with my mouse it certainly could’ve come out worse.

Now available on your local NFT marketplace.

If you deign to partake in this particular game and can doodle a more convincing jolly roger, do feel free to drop a link in the comments or to show me on Twitter. I’d be delighted to see such a thing.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 2

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

“I’ve set myself to become King of the Pirates…and if I die trying…then at least I tried!”

The very first person Luffy D. Monkey tells about his ambition to become King of the Pirates is a dejected, down-on-his-luck cabin boy named Koby. I don’t know what it is, but that’s just absolutely hilarious to me for some reason. He’s the Jimmy Olsen to Luffy’s Superman, except I think if you put Koby and Olsen in a fight, Olsen would probably win.

I said when I began this project that I wouldn’t sugarcoat my opinion if I felt One Piece did something problematic or just straight up bad. We don’t cross into the latter at all here, but the former….eh, yeah, kind of. There’s just something a little weird about this chapter’s villain, a beauty-obsessed overweight woman with a huge mace named Lady Alvida. That said; I’ve definitely seen a lot worse, so I’ll not harp on it too hard, here.

Mostly, she serves as a decent starter villain for Luffy. Her modus operandi seems to be very simple; she asks her crew, under her wood-deck tyranny, who is the fairest of them all. If they don’t say her, she hits them with a giant mace.

When Luffy confronts her, he has an obvious opening; since his body is made of weird magic rubber stuff, he can’t be hurt by the mace, which Alvida doesn’t see coming because, well, why in the living thunder would she? Luffy takes advantage of her confusion, and promptly decks her across the face. I really hope he keeps doing this to every villain, it’s funny as hell.

More important is that we get a little bit of exposition here! Koby balks at the very notion that Luffy could ever be King of the Pirates, which eventually leads him to reply with this article’s lead quote. He incredulously mentions that Luffy will have to go to the Grand Line if he wants to accomplish such a thing. What’s the Grand Line? Who knows! A “graveyard for pirates”, apparently, which sounds suitably dangerous for our hero. Also, I had no idea that One Piece was named after an actual thing within its universe, but apparently Gold Roger’s treasure is called the “One Piece.”

In general this chapter does a lot to establish that, yeah, even ten years after the prologue, Luffy is still kind of amusingly dumb. It’s a likable sort of dumb; he doesn’t really sugarcoat anything and speaks his mind in an extremely straightforward way, even when he maybe shouldn’t.

The beginning of the chapter reestablishes that he can’t swim (who am I to judge? Neither can I), and he almost dies by being sucked into a whirlpool. Only to emerge like this a few pages later.

Luffy is an odd one, and he ends this chapter with a new boat (still just a small dinghy, but hey, it’s a new small dinghy), and a new companion; the aforementioned cabin boy, who wants to eventually join the navy.

A pirates’ graveyard and a mysterious bounty hunter. I wonder what sort of adventure our boys are about to sail themselves into? I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.

Until then.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 1

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

The temptation when starting a project like this is always to make grand statements of intent and purpose. I’ve already explained my reasoning at length in the intro article, though, so all that’s really left to do is aweigh the proverbial anchors and set sail. As I mentioned there, some back of the envelope math tells me that even if I keep up the rate of one chapter per day, every single day, with no breaks, and even if no new material came out at all, it will take me somewhere on the order of three years to catch up to the current chapter. Lots of things can happen in three years, but the great cliché goes that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We take that step today, together. I do hope you’re reading along.

I wonder what it was like, on that hot July day in ’97, to read the first chapter of One Piece. Did people read this and just know that they had something special on their hands? I certainly didn’t, I was a mere three years old at the time and even if I could’ve read comic books of any kind, I don’t believe One Piece was translated into English for some time until after it debuted.

I suspect that most people took away from the first chapter back then basically what I took away from it today; it’s got some really great action scenes and some nice cartoony art. For the first step of a thousand-mile journey, that’s probably more than enough.

Another thing that strikes me right out of the gate is a strong—albeit, simple—theme. There’s some solid thoughts had about the true nature of strength itself here. We’re introduced to Monkey D. Luffy as a kid, and he has a kid’s idea of what it means to be strong. His role model / eventual hat donor Captain Redhair Shanks just taking it in stride when “mountain bandits” intimidate him and his crew in a bar confuses Luffy. (And because Luffy is a young boy in a shonen manga, he expresses that confusion loudly and angrily.)

But when they go after Luffy himself later in the chapter, Redhair’s crew dispatch most of them with minimal fuss, proving that they could have fought off the bandits all along. There’s having strength, and there’s knowing what to do with it, and over this chapter, Luffy learns the difference. (Or at least, gets the first of however many lessons.) I think the key is here, fairly early on, where Redhair pretty much lays it out plain.

I’m particularly fond of the scene where the bandit leader kidnaps Luffy. He’s eaten by a sea serpent—a properly cartoony-monstrous thing, all crocodile teeth and fish fins—and it’s up to Redhair to fight the thing off and save Luffy. The fact that he loses an arm in the process barely seems to faze him. He saved his little buddy, that’s the important thing, right?

So the prologue ends, and years later when Luffy sets out on his own journey, he avenges his mentor by clocking that “local sea monster” right across the face as he paddles out to sea in nothing more than a wooden rowboat. The two-page spread of Luffy womping the monster is nice and dynamic, incidentally, it’s probably the best art in the whole chapter.

If you’re not reading along you’re probably puzzled as to why he has Mr. Fantastic-esque stretchy powers. The answer is that he ate a magic fruit. Manga truly is a medium without parallel.

An image that strikes me even more though, is the final page of the chapter. Luffy, despite being alone on a little rickety-rack ship in the middle of the ocean, loudly declares to no one in particular that he’s going to become king of the pirates! To surpass Redhair Shanks (and eventually return the older captain’s straw hat!), presumably find Gold Roger’s buried treasure which we learned about in the chapter’s intro. All that good stuff! Adventure, hoy!

As in the ocean, so on land, and as he goes, so too do we.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Announcement & Overview

One Piece, Eiichiro Oda‘s magnum opus, is, by some metrics, the most popular manga ever written. It’s a defining work of the modern shonen landscape, and in a broader sense, massively influential to a whole generation of creative talents both within Japan and abroad. The adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, have been captivating audiences for 25 years; a quarter of a century as of next month. But, if you know enough about anime and manga to even be aware of this blog, let alone be reading it, you know all of that. So why am I telling you something you already know?

Well, to be frank, despite its massive popularity and a reputation that precedes it by a nautical mile, I’ve never read a single page or watched a single minute of One Piece. For whatever reason, until recently, I’d just never felt compelled to. This is, in its own way, strange for me personally. I’ve been a fan of anime and manga since I was pretty young, and I was a child of the Toonami era of American anime distribution. On top of that, I really like pirate stories! Around that very same time, the Pirates of the Caribbean films were some of my favorites (and I still kind of like them today, despite their poor critical reception and any thoughts I may have about a certain actor who was in them).

But I was a dumb preteen, and then a dumb teen, and when I was that age I had a vague snobbery to my taste in anime. I don’t remember, exactly, but I think, knowing myself at the time, I probably just assumed that anything that was that popular couldn’t possibly be worth my time. In hindsight, this was very stupid for a lot of reasons, but there’s not much sense in dwelling on it. Still, even as I’ve gotten older the time just hasn’t felt right.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that this was also a very dumb attitude to have. A few things put it in perspective for me; the keen awareness that while I’m not old yet I’m certainly not getting any younger, the recent popularity of tumblr phenomenon Dracula Daily, and my own aforementioned thoughts on a certain actor in a trilogy of pirate movies that I used to like.

And then, about a week ago, I learned—spoiler for a recent One Piece manga chapter, I think, coming literally right after this interjection, you’ve been warned—that there is a trans woman in the series as of a recent chapter of the story. And that scrap of representation was, I think, what the last of my weird, completely irrational, totally pointless defenses against this shonen series needed to fall. “Fuck it” I thought. “What is there to lose?”

Hence; this project. The premise is extremely simple. I will read the One Piece manga. Every single day, you will have a new article to read—usually on the shorter side—about a chapter of said manga. Starting from the beginning. In order. One day at a time.

It will take me, provided I take no breaks, and not accounting for any chapters that have yet to be released, about three years to catch up to where the manga is at the time of this writing, June 6th, 2022. I am setting myself a fundamentally absurd task, to not just read a very long story but to write about it, to write about every single part of it.

I have a lot of reasons for wanting to do this, but the biggest is simply to see if I can. I’m not quite brave enough to leave myself no escape hatches here; if the columns are pulling little interest by the time I’ve finished the first collected volume I’ll probably pull the plug and just continue reading the series by myself. Likewise, if I burn out on the project I will allow myself to take hiatuses. But still, I’m optimistic. The real honest core of this whole project is that I just Want To Do This. It’s a Mt. Everest for a lifelong couch potato.

Also! I want you, yes you, the girl, boy, enby, or whatever else you may be reading this, to read One Piece along with me. A chapter a day is not much; while One Piece on the whole is very long, the individual chapters are only a brisk 20 or so pages each. It will be entirely viable for you, dear reader, to settle in with a chapter of the story and one of my columns at night before you turn in for bed, or in the morning before you go to work. Is assuming that you want to arrogant of me? Maybe, but I think it’ll be fun, and I place a lot of value in fun.

As for how I’m doing this, here are the basics.

I will be reading the chapters myself in chunks, usually a few at a time, because I want to keep a nice buffer for myself so that way there will be—ideally!—a new One Piece Every Day, you know, every day.

I fully intend to give my honest thoughts on each chapter. Those may be very brief or very lengthy, and they may skew positive or negative. (I have already been informed by some well-meaning friends that there are some things in this manga that have Not Aged Well, but I have never shied away from earnestly evaluating art, even if it is problematic at times.)

These columns will have their own archive on the main page, as well as their own “recent posts” section. (They technically already do, that was the reason behind that unexplained change a few days ago, for those of you who noticed.)

And that’s basically it! Conceptually, this is all very simple. It is just a matter of effort. And there’s good news on that front; if you’re reading this, I’ve already read the first week’s worth of chapters, and already have the columns written. So, I’m already getting this ship ready to sail, you just need to decide if you’re on board or not.

I hope to see you tomorrow, for the proper casting off.

Until then.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.