Category: Manga

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day, Uncategorized

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 58

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The Cover Issue: It seems like Buggy’s former crew are still slugging things out. I’m still rooting for the acrobat.

In middle and high school English classes, they sometimes teach you to try to search for the “main idea” of a story. Usually, they use purpose-built short stories for this, or a carefully-curated selection of classics that you can more or less fit into that mold if you squint. But this practice neglects the multitudes that even very brief bits of fiction can contain. Chapter 58 of One Piece is, of course, just one tiny part of a much larger whole. But on its own, it’s also a riveting 18 pages of oceanic desperation. Sure, this is Sanji and Zeff’s backstory, but it’s also just a damn compelling piece of life-at-its-limits storytelling. In this chapter we learn how Sanji and Zeff survived for 80 days—nearly three whole months—with nothing but a single sack of food on a deserted sea stack.

Initially, Sanji is optimistic about their situation, dividing his rations into 20 portions so he can stretch out nearly a month’s worth of food, even if he’s only getting the bare minimum. That initial optimism turns to grim, do-anything-to-survive desperation as the weeks wear on. We get to see it happen, mostly within the span of a single page, in what is probably One Piece‘s greatest feat of storytelling economy up ’til this point.

Eventually, he gets desperate enough to try attacking Zeff, to steal his food. Only to learn that the old pirate doesn’t actually have any food with him; he’s been sitting there, slowly starving, for months. The only bag he had was filled with gold and jewels, not a morsel of actual food. When he cut his leg off last issue? That was because it was hurt, sure, but he was also preparing to eat it. All that to keep Sanji alive.

That all leads up to this page, a genuinely poetic lament from the very much dying Zeff, as he confides in Sanji that he too seeks the All Blue, and also shares with him his new dream; to open an ocean-going restaurant.

Thankfully, for both Zeff and for us, a ship comes by not many days later, and the starving pirate and equally-starving Sanji are saved.

We then, of course, cut back to present.

Tomorrow: Sanji vs. Pearl.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 57

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The Cover Issue: It would seem that some of Buggy’s crew are figuring out who’s going to take up the captain’s hat the old-fashioned way. I don’t remember these twos’ names, but I do remember that Lion Tamer Boy here was a dick to that dog, so I’m rooting for the acrobat guy.

Today, we learn how Sanji and Zeff went from being on opposite ends of a pirate raid to having the complicated relationship they do now. Spoiler alert; Zeff’s pirates’ raid on the Orbit does not go as planned.

Most of the Orbit’s crew are willing to roll over for Zeff, but not Sanji himself. Convinced his life is in danger, he attacks not just the pirate crew in general but Zeff himself with a pair of kitchen knives, wounding the captain notably badly.

Despite this, when the cook-to-be goes overboard, Zeff is the one who kicks down the ship’s mast in order to give him something to hold on to.

When the storm clears, Sanji finds himself washed up on a deserted island with no one but Zeff himself for company, the splintered wood of the Zeff’s own ship filling the water as the two try to survive for as long as possible.

More than most, there’s a real sense of the nautical to this chapter; sheets of at-sea rain, thrashing, wild waves, a gorgeous, fading island sunset, and so on. It’s definitely one of the best-looking One Piece chapters so far. If more of this is in store for us, I really can’t wait.

In any case, the chapter ends with Zeff taking a sharp rock to his leg. (Presumably it was infected.) Thus providing some context to Sanji’s earlier statement. Irony is a real jerk, isn’t she?

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 56

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The Cover Issue: A context-free but pleasant scene of Sanji and Luffy wrangling some buffaloes. One of whom is smoking!

This is quite an information-dense issue, but we can basically break down what happens into three main parts.

One: Gin threatens to kill Zeff, offering to spare his life if and only if Sanji and the rest of the cooks get off the ship ASAP. Sanji refuses, cryptically stating that he’s already taken so much from Zeff that he can’t allow him to lose anything else.

(In general, this is a rather intense chapter, and the art is more dynamic and impressive than normal, which is saying something, because One Piece already looks pretty good most of the time.)

Two: Uh-oh, Pearl is not actually dead. He kicks the shit out of Sanji, threatening his life by clapping the cook’s head between two of his shields. He also lights the ship on fire again (or maybe it just never went out from last issue), threatening the lives of everyone on board, including his own. Again.

Three: Sanji’s being knocked out is used as a transitional into a flashback, where we meet him at the young age of just 9, when he was an apprentice aboard a ship called the Orbit. He learns—and for the first time, we learn—about the legend of the ocean “All Blue”, a place where all the world’s oceans meet. It’s of keen interest to the other cooks aboard the Orbit, since anywhere where all the seas meet would have all of the world’s fish in it as well—at least, that’s their logic—and thus be a veritable seafood buffet. Of course, they don’t really believe in the thing, unlike Sanji, who very much does.

But that’s interrupted by the Orbit’s peaceful voyage being disrupted by a pirate raid, led by a very familiar captain.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 55

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The Cover Issue: We catch up with some of Buggy’s other crew here, who are apparently under the impression that he’s dead. I love the little funeral portrait they’ve made out of the ship’s timber, that’s a cute touch.

Here’s a fact to ponder; fire is actually super dangerous at sea. It was even moreso during the era of wooden ships. It would spread quickly, and it was difficult to get under control partly because there just isn’t really anywhere else to go, so it’s hard to manage on top of that.

This fact is relevant in today’s One Piece. Can you guess why?

Honestly, I got nothin’. This is a manga where we’ve already seen a guy destroy an entire ship with a single sword stroke, and somehow this is the first thing that just leaves me totally speechless. It just feels really random? Like sure, he can somehow make fire with his shield and he does it just as a reflex because he has jungle PTSD. It’s not even a bad development really, it’s just perplexing.

Out-of-nowhere-ness aside, his outburst does result in the predictable.

Although not for long. Pearl is actually defeated in this chapter, too, in a pretty solid battle mostly between him and Sanji but also featuring an assist from Luffy, who deflects one of Krieg’s huge spike ball things as a crucial moment when Krieg decides that Pearl’s causing more trouble than he’s worth. (Also in here; Zeff deflecting some of Pearl’s fireballs with nothing but the wind force generated by his kicks. Have I said “because manga is the only valid form of art” enough times in this column for it to count as a catchphrase yet?)

In any case, Krieg doesn’t seem to have the highest opinion of his second-in-command.

But there is at least one pirate who can pull his weight in Krieg’s crew.

Random question; do you remember Gin?

Tomorrow: Chef Zeff at gunpoint!

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 54

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The Cover Issue: In today’s Chapter cover (not the volume cover! Those are outside the scope of this, uh, sub-column?) Buggy and his lady-friend confirm their mutual hatred of Luffy and have dinner and wine while they’re at it. “PIRATE ALLIANCE”, the chapter text helpfully tells us.

The image of Buggy just going absolutely beast mode on an entire fish is going to haunt me for a long time.

So this chapter is mainly about two things. One; holy shit, Sanji is really good at kicking. (The unspoken implication being of course that Sanji studied under Zeff not just as a cook but as a fighter as well.) He also gets off a pretty great samurai vibes line about how knives are the soul of a chef.

Two; we meet a person named Pearl. (Also in the background of much of this issue, Luffy and Krieg are fighting elsewhere. Keep that in mind, it’s important.)

When I saw this chapter was called “Pearl”, I did indeed assume it’d introduce a character named that. But in my experience, Pearl is usually a girl’s name (think Steven Universe, Splatoon 2, I think that whale from Spongebob, etc.), and given one of the things One Piece is—ahem—known for, I sort of assumed Don Krieg would turn out to have a femme fatale pirate woman in his ranks.

Well, Pearl does work for Krieg, but he is….not that.

Yes, this is Don Krieg’s second-in-command, a walking dartboard made out of garbage can lids with a ponder-worthy orb for a hat. He is obsessed with his own handsomeness and also with not getting hurt in combat; he brags that he’s never lost “even one drop” of his own blood while fighting. He brags that he wouldn’t even get hurt if he were shot with a cannonball; you know how it goes.

Unfortunately, he’s also great at tempting fate, and you can probably guess that I wouldn’t be mentioning this if it weren’t relevant. Yes, as Luffy and Krieg are fighting on the next deck over, Krieg accidentally hurls Luffy in Pearl’s general direction, and this happens.

The reactions that follow are, shall we say, interesting, and imply some crazy shit is about to go down. That’s for tomorrow’s chapter, of course, because that’s where today’s ends.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 53

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

I hope you’re paying attention to the chapters’ cover art, because increasingly, they feel like foreshadowing, as much as telling a story all their own. But if you’re not, that’s okay, because from now on, we’re going to have a little additional segment to kick off each, or at least most, columns. Sometimes a whole paragraph, just a few sentences, it’s –

The Cover Issue: Here we’ve got the still-stranded Buggy being recruited by the woman we first saw back in issue 51. She seems to be a pirate-hunter of some sort, based on her wanted poster of—who else?—Luffy. This also lets us know that Luffy is getting a bit of a reputation. A well-earned one, I’d say.

“All right, ye sea wolves. Let’s capture that fish!”

The Baratie. The restaurant? It transforms.

There’s other stuff that happens in this chapter, sure. Krieg explains his master plan for returning to the Grand Line, for example.

But as another “20 pages of action” sort of deal, I’m just awestruck by how wonderfully ridiculous the transforming restaurant boat is. Krieg and his pirates raid the ship, hoping to capture it, and the mackerel head on the restaurant pops off, revealing that it’s an autonomous submersible with a cannon mounted in its mouth. Just truly top-of-the-line absurdity, here. I marvel at it.

Also; the ship has a second deck that rises up so that way the cooks can fight on it instead of damaging the restaurant. Again, just absolutely peak Anime Engineering going on here.

If you think that this is going to make Krieg’s crew pushovers though, think again. Krieg might be in over his head when it comes to Hawkeye, but he’s no lightweight, and he proves it by simply picking the Mackerel Head up and tossing it back at the restaurant.

Where it is promptly deflected.

With a single kick.

By Sanji.

Manga is the only valid form of art.

Tomorrow: who the hell knows?! But in a good way.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 52

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

Zolo isn’t really dead. You’re probably not shocked! I know I’m not, because he’s one of the franchise’s main characters. How is he still alive? Well, Hawkeye just….uh, cut him in a way so he won’t die. Look, just roll with it.

More than that, most of this chapter is about Zolo redoubling his oath to become the world’s greatest swordsman (it’s even called “The Oath”). Hawkeye—who gives us his improbably cool real name here—finds Zolo too strong in spirit to kill, and that’s why he’s spared him. He gives Zolo a pretty awesome speech here, actually. I really like this guy!

Zolo vows not just to eventually defeat Hawkeye, but to never lose again. Not just for himself, or for his late friend, but for Luffy’s sake, too.

All told, this is a pretty excellent scene, and Hawkeye caps it off by leaving as dramatically and mysteriously as he came. Or at least, he goes to do that, but there’s one person who still has other ideas.

Yes, Krieg makes the astounding decision to try to kill Hawkeye, despite the man single-handedly wrecking his entire fleet before, and despite what he just did to Zolo. It goes about as well as you’d expect, and our story here splinters in to as Hawkeye once again unleashes his sword techniques to completely mulch a boat Krieg is on.

And Luffy, in the final piece of this particular puzzle of timber and saltwater, vows to drive off Krieg’s pirates, who are now swarming the oceanbound restaurant en masse, in exchange for being able to ditch his choreboy obligations.

Tomorrow: one sea, two ships.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day, Uncategorized

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 51

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

Before we even start talking about today’s actual chapter, turn your eyes up to that cover.

I’ve been basically just letting the whole Chibi Buggy Saga play out without much commentary in the headers of these articles (always cropped, to make them not look absolutely awful on desktop) but this one actually introduces a new character! A mysterious lady-pirate rocking a cowboy hat who seems to have taken in Buggy as her pet short king. Good for him, I guess?

As for the chapter itself, this is the first one in a while to basically be pure action. An honorable duel between the villainous Hawkeye and the heroic Zolo (eh, more or less, on both counts). I also want to highlight Zolo’s quip here off the top, because, yeah, I am also surprised that we’ve gotten to actually meet Hawkeye this early.

Part of me wonders; was One Piece being allowed to publish basically indefinitely not a sure thing yet this early on? That would make sense, we’re 50 chapters in, but given that as far as I know One Piece has always been a weekly, that only represents around 2 1/2 months of publishing time. Maybe it was not yet the utterly massive hit that it would later become, and Oda wanted to start bringing some plot threads to a close, or at least moving them closer to a conclusion, just in case? This is all speculation, if I’m wrong and 1P was a total smash basically right away feel free to correct me in the comments.

In any case, much of this duel is devoted to showing how much better at Sword Hawkeye is than Zolo. Zolo hasn’t really had a proper challenge in this series yet, and Hawkeye less gives him one and more completely wipes the floor with him.

Did I mention, he doesn’t use that big fancy cross-shaped sword across his back with the black blade to do it? No, he uses a little dagger. Like a really little dagger.

I bet people ship these two really hard.

Spoiler alert; he does not need anything bigger than the dagger.

This sends Zolo into a bit of a spiral, with Oda again deploying his technique of “fading” memory panels in and out to create a flashback that’s actively weaved with the manga’s present-tense. (It’s worth noting that alongside all the memories of his late friend to whom he promised to become the world’s greatest swordsman is a memory of Luffy recruiting him to his crew.) Zolo refuses to believe that they could possibly be this mismatched, but they are, and Hawkeye cuts his belly open to prove it.

Hawkeye is, at the very least, impressed by Zolo’s bravery as he manages to spit out that to him, death would be better than defeat. Hawkeye, out of a sense of honor, makes him stick to that, and the second slash he delivers to Zolo’s frame is a lot more lethal.

Tomorrow: How will the swordsman survive?!

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 50

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

The water around the ocean restaurant is a wooden graveyard as chapter 50 opens, with the splintered tatters of Don Krieg’s flagship littering the ocean.

This chapter is mainly about two things; for one, we see that yes, Nami really did make off with the Merry-Go and all the treasure on it. Most of Luffy’s meager remaining crew are willing to write her off, but not the captain.

To that, he sends Zolo and Usopp after Nami while he stays to help the ocean restaurant fend off the attack from Krieg’s pirates. But, before that can even be acted upon, the other person this chapter is about shows up. Someone I’m very surprised to see so early, given the nature of the foreshadowing just a few chapters ago.

I’d introduce the man, but that’s kind of the sum of it right there, isn’t it? “World’s Greatest Swordsman” is not a title that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. This is, in fact, the man Zolo’s been looking for, and it doesn’t take long for the two of them to start doing the whole “circling each other menacingly while talking shit” routine. The fight doesn’t actually happen here—that’s next chapter, presumably—but the tension is palpable. (And marginally homo-erotic. Par for the course for this sort of thing.)

As for Nami and her floating trove of stolen treasure, well, that’s a bit of a mystery for the time being as well. The chapter closes on this page, and this particular note. Much is in the air, just waiting to fall down.

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.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 49

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.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

Gonna just warn you ahead of time here, folks. Today’s chapter and tomorrow’s are going to be covered by a decidedly tired Tired Jane. What is the main distinction between regular and Tired Jane? Well, mostly, the tiredness. But a general laxness of grammar, tendency to fixate on minor details instead of actual plot developments, and an increase in profanity are some of the common symptoms. Just a heads’ up if the next two columns are a little looser than usual.

The main thing we learn in chapter 49 is that the guy who wrecked Krieg’s fleet is not just some random background character. No, he’s a specific background character.

This Hawkeye fellow seems pretty darn important. He’s both the man who wrecked Krieg’s armada and the guy that Zolo’s been after. (Or at least, Zolo seems pretty sure that he is.) There’s a fairly lengthy scene after this about the various dangers of the Grand Line that mostly rehashes things we already know or could easily infer.

Meanwhile, back on Krieg’s ship, his pirates return themselves to health, and he announces his plan to hijack the oceangoing restaurant and then return to the Grand Line. One of his crew objects to this plan, and is promptly dealt with in, ah, pirate-y fashion.

But before Krieg’s men can actually launch their attack….well, something happens. To be honest, the art gets a little difficult for me to parse here? It seems to be that Krieg’s flagship is suddenly rocked by an explosion or similar force, and promptly sinks like a stone, leaving the pirates to distribute themselves between the restaurant ship and Luffy’s ship. Except that’s not quite right either, because Nami seemingly takes the ship and runs as the chapter comes to a close!

What just happened? Questions for tomorrow, one supposes.

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.