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!
We open today immediately after the conclusion of yesterday’s chapter, on Luffy and the floating diner’s head chef arguing over whether our boy will work for the chef for a week, a year, or if he’s willing to pay a different sort of price.
I am reasonably sure that this is not how that works.
This actually isn’t the main plot of the chapter though—it’s more a humorous B-side, as the whole thing is played pretty goofy—instead, the real Point A to Point B here comes from a conflict between Sanji and a new character, a surly cook with a….Brooklyn accent? I think that’s what they’re going for? Named Patty. Patty is not a very good cook apparently, and he frequently minces common customer service sayings (there’s even a ‘monsieur’ -> ‘mon-sewer’ bit straight out of Looney Tunes). But he does very strongly believe that the customer is king, which puts him into conflict with Sanji who, you’ll recall, is beating the shit out of that Fullbody fellow because he didn’t like Sanji’s soup. There’s some pretty great dialogue here and, honestly, all throughout the chapter. Lots of little bits of wordplay and double meanings and stuff like that, it’s fun.
This continues even after the chapter socks you with its main twist; one of the captive pirates from Fullbody’s ship has escaped and, oh no, he’s on the restaurant boat.
Despite this colorful introduction, the fellow isn’t actually much of a threat. Patty, who is apparently crazy strong because of manga reasons, knocks him in the head and tosses him out onto the deck. Here we get the chapter’s actual twist, which is that Sanji, despite absolutely ripping Fullbody earlier, is the kind of guy who’ll give some rice to a starving man even if that man might not necessarily “deserve” it. (Everyone deserves food whenever they need it, in my world view, but Patty does not seem to agree.)
The chapter—and the volume!—end here, with Luffy observing Sanji’s act of kindness and thinking that just perhaps, he’s found his cook.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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!
Today on One Piece; a lesson in not wasting your food.
It starts off simple enough; our heroes pull up to the oceanbound restaurant mentioned last chapter, a magnificently goofy thing that is shaped like a fish.
But we’re introduced in short order to the guy who I was pretty sure was going to be this arc’s antagonist, but I’m actually not so certain at the moment for reasons I’ll get to in a bit. In any case, he’s quite the character.
Yes. A Navy Lieutenant. Named Ironfist Fullbody. I imagine in the dub they had someone do a really gruff and low voice for him for maximum impact. Again, I think this is a slight bit of misdirection, but he does make quite the first impression here. Almost immediately after this, he orders one of his cannoneers to sink the Merry Go.
Now, our heroes’ ship is fine, because Luffy blocks the cannonball with his, ahem, ‘gum gum balloon.’ The restaurant on the other hand, is not, because it turns out that Luffy doesn’t have great finesse as to where the things he deflects with that little trick end up.
Cut to the inside of the restaurant—the main body of the ship has thankfully not been hit by the deflected cannonball, evidently—and we get to see Fullbody trying to impress his, one assumes, fiancé, by dazzling her with his knowledge of wine.
Yes, Ol’ Ironfist here is a sommelier. But it’s actually worse than that, because as we soon learn, he’s a wannabe sommelier, as shown when he asks the restaurant’s ‘waiter’ if he’s right about the wine.
Sanji here—one of those rare few One Piece characters I knew by sight before reading this—basically clowns Fullbody’s entire existence. He denies his attempt at coming off as a Cool Wine Guy, and when Fullbody finds (or, I think, plants) a bug in his own soup, Sanji tells him to just pick it out. Which hey, fair thing to Fullbody here; that’s fucking gross. But on the other hand, you’re in the middle of the ocean. Perhaps you don’t get to be picky, navy boy.
Things keep escalating like this, but eventually Sanji’s had enough, simply because he can’t stand to see good food wasted, and the end result is that the big invincible monster heel we’ve been building up all chapter ends it looking like this.
That’s not quite the end of the story, though. While all this is happening, Luffy is taken aboard the restaurant. This leads to some further, ah, interesting conversations.
Thankfully Luffy is misunderstanding this whole scene and he did not actually blow off a guy’s leg. But still, you can see why he’d think that. Luffy is here drafted to work aboard the ship without pay for a year to make up for the damages incurred by his, you know, blowing a hole in it, and the chapter properly ends there, leaving the whole rest of this to be resolved tomorrow.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this slightly-longer-than-normal column, pirates. I’m hoping it makes up for my absence yesterday. See you all tomorrow!
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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!
Did you think we were done with our big emotional climax after last chapter? Well, we mostly are, but not quite yet.
Two things happen in this chapter; for one, Kaya gifts Luffy’s crew a caravel, which I and any other former Civilization III players reading this will recognize as a mid-sized vessel common in the 16th century. It’s hardly the Queen Anne’s Revenge, but this ship, the Merry Go, is the first proper vessel our heroes have ever had. 41 chapters in, we’ve already covered a lot of ground (even if we’re still very early on in the greater scope of things), so it’s nice to see them tangibly upgrading to something bigger and better.
Secondly, Usopp says his last goodbyes to Kaya. Granted, not before overpacking to the extent that his comically large backpack causes him to topple over and role down a hill in true slapstick fashion.
Other than a few other jokes (including a great bit where Luffy has to be told not to eat the entire bones of a fish), the main takeaway here is that Kaya will be just fine, and that Usopp’s chronic lying actually has a reason behind it. A pretty sad one! Although you could probably guess that much.
To be honest, this strikes me as a little unnecessary? The simple fact that Usopp’s mom isn’t around kind of makes it obvious from the start that something’s happened to her. That said; the target audience for this manga is, or at least was at the time, kids, so maybe being a little obvious is fine.
As the chapter ends, Kaya talks to Merry—her actually loyal butler—about her dreams for the future, while Usopp’s former “crew” gallavant through the town, continuing his, ahem, sacred work.
Usopp himself and the rest of Luffy’s crew? They’re gone, back on the deep blue sea.
Tomorrow: new adventures.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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!
In today’s chapter: farewells and castings-off.
The defeated Captain Kuro is batted out of the series with one final panel of Luffy piledriving his head into the ground. I actually particularly like this because we also see his glasses bounce away, crushed. It’s fun to see a character’s personal symbol of sorts destroyed as a visual metaphor for their defeat.
And Luffy manages to get off one last bit of “I’m gonna be king of the pirates” chest-puffing before promptly collapsing from exhaustion and/or blood loss. (Don’t worry, he’s fine. You know how shonen protagonists are.)
But for the most part, this chapter is about Usopp, who decides to swear his “crew”—as well as everyone else—to secrecy, so that the people of his town don’t worry about the pirate raid that they only just avoided being caught up in.
I remain rather averse to the “boy who cried wolf” trope, but I like Usopp basically twisting it inside-out here, relying on his own bad reputation to protect the townsfolk’s peace of mind. One can understand where he’s coming from in a very immediate way, that’s a nice thing in a story like this that more or less lives and dies on the readership being able to connect to the characters in an immediate, intuitive way.
At the end of the chapter, he strikes off on his own, now dead-set on becoming a real pirate, rather than simply a teller of tall tales. Of course, in order to do that, there’s a group of people he has to bid farewell to.
As he leaves his “pirate crew” behind, Usopp makes the boys swear to keep pursuing their own dreams. It’s genuinely really sweet.
All this to say; Usopp is a good lad, my initial impression of the character wasn’t terribly favorable, but hey, that happens sometimes.
Now then, before I bid you all farewell for the day, I’ve decided that fielding y’all a question every ten chapters or so will be a fun way to keep things fresh.
Last time I asked you what manga you were reading other than One Piece itself (and hey, if you’ve picked up something in the interim, feel free to share). Today I’ll ask what anime you’re watching this season, if any. Y’all can reasonably intuit from my anime columns that I’m watching Lycoris Recoil, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (the recap for which I’m slightly putting off by writing this first, in fact….), and Call of the Night. In addition to that I’ve been keeping up with Smile of the Arsnotoria, Teppen (although it actually skipped its second episode for absolutely wild reasons I won’t go into here), YUREI DECO, Tokyo Mew Mew New, the RWBY anime Ice Queendom, and carrying over from last season, Summertime Render (don’t tell Disney). What about you?
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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 like the way today’s chapter is put together. Functionally, you’ve got two fights; one between Luffy and Kuro and another between Kaya, Usopp’s ‘crew’, and Django (which later gets two extra participants as the chapter comes to a close). The chapter keeps up the tension with the fairly simple trick of swapping between them, so there are no real “dead moments” at any point.
One Piece is good about this in general, but I find chapter 39 fairly exceptional in this regard. Basically everybody—at least, all the ‘good guys’, excepting Nami—get a solid badass moment. In something this long, you cannot expect every single chapter to have major story revelations or anything like that, but it’s good one when can make an exceptional showing on the Cool Points front, if nothing else.
It’s Luffy who gets the bulk of them, as despite Kuro’s techniques, he’s not much of a match for the rubberband pirate (assuming he doesn’t have some other secret trick up his sleeve anyhow), and Luffy is able to lay him flat without too much trouble over the course of the chapter.
Kuro of course panics about this, and we get one of those huge open-mouthed hollers that Oda seems to love drawing.
Meanwhile, Kaya is willing to sign the will without being mind-controlled, if Django will just leave Usopp’s little friends alone. The hitman hypnotist is having none of it, though, and Kaya actually has to threaten to hurt herself in order to get him to even consider it.
And Usopp’s crew promptly get their moment a few pages later when they charge him from behind and knock him on his ass. Which buys all involved just enough time for Zolo and Usopp to show up.
It’s actually Usopp himself who gets the final blow on Django, hitting him with some sort of exploding projectile via his slingshot.
And meanwhile, back at the beach, Luffy seems to put Captain Kuro down for good. Look at that neck; I don’t know if he’s coming back from that one.
Tomorrow: Is the battle over, or just beginning?
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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!
Rule 1 of a shonen manga – Any time someone says something like “oh no, the ultimate technique!” you need to get out of where you are as fast as possible.
A few other things happen in this chapter, but for the most part, Chapter 38 is Kuro and Luffy going at it again, and Kuro threatening the ever-living hell out of his old crew.
You might think disclosing your intent to kill a bunch of people ahead of time would be unwise, but if it is, the Black Cats are even less wise, since they mostly take the route of pleading with him rather than, say, running away. Even later in the chapter when he starts saying things like this.
It is worth noting that given the makeshift-democratic character of most pirate charters, this could be argued to be almost the exact opposite of a “real pirate’s” attitude.
As the chapter closes, he unleashes his—seriously—“Out the Bag” technique, which seems to consist of moving so quickly that he’s invisible to the naked eye and slashing everything in the area to ribbons. Pretty standard shonen manga stuff, but still not something you’d want to get caught in, for certain. We very briefly catch up with Nami here, too, although only just long enough for her to have this reaction to the attack.
Meanwhile in the woods, Django tries to force Kaya to open her eyes so he can hypnotize her, and the pirate kids try to attack him while he’s distracted. This goes….badly, and their ultimate fate here is again left uncertain.
Tomorrow: These two stories sail on.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.
This column contains spoilers for Part 1 of Chainsaw Man.
Content Warning: The material covered here contains depictions of extreme violence.
Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with Chainsaw Man whatsoever. But sometimes, the stars align, and something grips you like it’s trying to choke you out and just doesn’t let go. Sometimes too, that happens just before a long-awaited follow-up is about to start. They say timing is everything because it is, and sometimes that timing works out in your favor. Hence this going up mere hours after the opening chapter of Part 2 drops on MangaPlus.
Suffice it to say we’re bending the rules here, too, since Chainsaw Man Part 2 is only a “new” manga with a fair bit of definitional stretching. (MangaPlus doesn’t even count it as a different series than Part 1.) So if you’re not caught up with the first Chainsaw Man arc, if you’re in the position I was in barely a week ago, I recommend closing this column now and go giving it a read, because I’m about to spoil the hell out of it.
It’s lurid, violent, bleak, coarse, and profane. The medium; a world where humanity’s fears materialize into living beings called devils, and of course, where humans called devil hunters must stop them. A story about bad people dying in worse ways that is not afraid to kill off even major characters sometimes suddenly and without warning, but never feels like it’s doing so for simple wanton shock value. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, easily a best-in-genre for the new decade without much in the way of competition. Part 2 has much to live up to.
The end of Part 1 marked also the end of the so-called “Public Safety Arc.” Denji surviving, nearly totally alone, after a wave of death and disillusionment that saw him shed whatever naivety he may still have had. But he’s come out the other side a better person regardless, even as he was one of just three named characters (four if you count Pochi) to survive the often-brutal first part of the manga.
It’s clear that some amount of time has passed, although perhaps not much. The main point to note here is the continued lionization of Chainsaw Man himself, Denji’s hellish heroic alter ego who now serves as both a source of inspiration to the general public and, going by the Curry Man buns we see in this chapter, marketing revenue. (That’s capitalism, babey.)
But anyone who’s main draw to the manga is Denji himself may be disappointed with the opening of Part 2. Instead, we follow a new character entirely, whose comparative mundanity is almost certainly a deliberate contrast to Denji’s dire circumstances at the start of his own story. Perhaps more importantly, like all of the best Chainsaw Man chapters, the opener for Part 2 begins with some off-the-wall crazy shit.
The logic behind this devil being weak is that no one is really scared of chickens. I feel like enough people have read Fourteen for there to be at least something there? Maybe not. It’s not like I’ve read it.
Our real POV character here is Asa Mitaka. An antisocial, and thus, profoundly normal, high school girl. The only real wrinkle here is that her parents were killed by devils, but that’s not particularly unusual within the context of Chainsaw Man. So the notion of the ordinary high school girl remains.
Don’t worry, she doesn’t stay ordinary for very long.
Mitaka seems to spend most of her days being vaguely annoyed at her classmates and, it’s pretty obvious even before it’s said out loud, jealous of their normal, healthy friendships with each other and, eventually, with Bucky, whose absolutely god-awful chicken puns inevitably endear him to the rest of the class. Meanwhile, the class president tries to get Mitaka to socialize a bit more and open up to the rest of her schoolmates.
Now, anyone familiar with Chainsaw Man would be easily able to tell that something was going to go south here, but I think a lot of people will mistakenly pin the suspicion on Bucky himself. Deliberate misdirection? Maybe. But maybe we’ve just been conditioned to be suspicious of devils over the course of the series’ run so far. Either way, he’s actually a genuinely affable sort by the look of it, and for a brief, split second, you can, if you want to, squint and pretend this is a happy manga where people are allowed to have personal realizations about themselves without an accompanying wallop of massive pain and loss.
Moments after this, she trips and falls, crushing the weak little devil to smithereens. It’s all rather nasty.
The fallout is immediate and predictable, and Mitaka takes this about as well as you’d expect.
The class president, as well as the two’s teacher, Mr. Tanaka, get the idea to visit the poor little hell-chicken’s grave. Tanaka is perhaps under the notion that this will make Mitaka feel better, but the class president quite quickly reveals herself to have a rather different motive, and things promptly get all sorts of gnarly.
In the fractions of a second Mitaka has before this monster—the Justice Devil, per the class president’s own admission—slashes her head in half, she feels relieved, because the president brags that she tripped Mitaka, so Bucky’s death wasn’t really her fault. Implicitly, she’s also relieved that she won’t be hurt anymore. That’s the kind of weapons-grade depressing you can expect from Chainsaw Man.
But it also wouldn’t be Chainsaw Man without some bolt-from-the-blue insane twist, and wouldn’t you know it, even with her head doing its best impression of a rotting pumpkin, Mitaka has just enough presence of mind to witness—and hear—a devilish owl perching on a nearby stoplight.
We don’t hear Mitaka think ‘yes’, but what happens next implies that either she did or the owl even asking was a formality. Not a page later, Mitaka—or at least, something in Mitaka’s body—rises back to her feet, only a truly wicked scar where her head was previously carved in half.
The natural questions follow; “Didn’t you just die?” “What the hell are you?” etc.
Reborn, “Mitaka” replies by doing this.
And introduces herself as The War Devil. What follows is, of course, an absolute show-stopper. Hyperviolence on a level that is hard to even describe with words; somewhere in there between the spinal cord longsword and the hand grenade reconstituted from the Justice Devil’s own actual arm, is the kind of bloody poetry that you really just can’t get outside of comic books. It all ends in an explosion and a shower of gore, because obviously it does, this is Chainsaw Man, remember? This kind of casual “I’m back, bitch” flexing is, if anything, hugely welcome in a medium that is only very rarely kind to even its superstars. This is mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto in a braggart mode he’s earned every right to be in.
The chapter’s last page establishes that everything we’ve just seen, if it weren’t already obvious, is an origin story. It’s never a safe bet to call any character’s longevity in Chainsaw Man, but Mitaka (or the War Devil? Or both? It’s a bit hard to say) seems like she’ll stick around for a long while. In the very closing moments here, she makes a comment about nuclear weapons that should be tossing up all kinds of red flags for any long-time Chainsaw Man readers; it’s been established before that those were among the concepts “removed” from reality by Makima’s makimachinations. (On that note; Makima is probably my favorite character in the whole manga, and I think about the only thing this chapter was missing was an appearance by her reincarnated self in the form of Nayuta. But! That will come in time.)
Trying to forecast almost anything about Chainsaw Man is a fool’s game, so I won’t pretend I’ve got anything sussed out. For me, the wait between the old and new Chainsaw Man was only a few days, and even I’m mostly just super happy to have it back. I find it difficult to imagine enduring the whole year-ish hiatus, so I know for sure I’m far from the only person who’s glad to see it again.
Chainsaw Man may well appear here on Magic Planet Anime again in the, ultimately, not-too-distant future, but until then, manga fans.
Like what you’re reading? 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 Directoryto 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.
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!
Today marks the start of a new chapter. Another instance where the placement feels kind of random, since it seems more like this arc is ending than beginning. Still, this is a pretty explosive way to kick things off, and the chapter does use the extra couple pages afforded to it here well. Lots of action in this one; so if you’re into that sort of thing (and hey, who isn’t?) you could do a lot worse than this.
If you’ve somehow lost track of things though, don’t worry, One Piece will happily get you up to speed with this character cheat sheet. (Honestly, these things are a godsend for critics like myself, too. I won’t pretend otherwise.)
We also get a particularly nasty glower from the Bad Butler as our chapter art. It makes him right mean looking, I’ll say that much.
The chapter itself opens with Usopp’s pirates running Kaya through the woods to the North of the slope on which Luffy, Zolo, and Kuro are still fighting. They keep a good pace, but Django is in hot pursuit the entire time, and as we eventually see at the end of the chapter, he does catch up to them. Partly by doing a bit of ad-hoc forestry with his chakrams as he pursues them.
There’s also some character building for Kuro. Do remember; developing a character does not necessarily imply developing them to be a better person. Sometimes, it means just revealing what an utter heel they’ve been the entire time.
Usopp gets more of the good kind, straining and determined even through the Black Cat Pirates’ insults and his own serious injuries as Zolo takes down Butchie for good.
(It helps that Usopp has Luffy on his side here. Not someone who takes disrespect toward his friends lightly.)
Kuro ultimately confronts Luffy head on once Zolo gets his past him, asking why, exactly, he’s standing up for a village that isn’t his and that he has no connection to. Cryptically, Luffy replies there’s someone there he doesn’t want to die. I imagine he means Kaya, given his newfound respect for Usopp. But he might also just mean the butcher in town, knowing the gum-gum pirate.
In any case, the chapter ends with the two of them about to face off, and with Django catching up to Kaya and Usopp’s little pirate friends.
Tomorrow: the fight continues.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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!
Hello folks! You’ll have to forgive the late upload today, I thought I had one in the tin for this morning already only to wake up and realize I did not. Hence; this one coming to you a bit late. (Don’t worry, I’m going to be penning a couple this afternoon, so this shouldn’t happen again. At least not for a while.)
Something I like about One Piece, and I’m not sure if I’ve outright said this, is the amount of weight it gives its battles. In modern shonen, even the very best fight scenes can sometimes feel over too quickly owing to the rather brisk pace of most modern TV anime and the manga they’re adapted from. (A particularly bad offender here, because I never miss a chance to take a shot at it, is the anime version of God of High School.) This isn’t to say the opposite is inherently a good thing, as someone who grew up watching a lot of Dragonball Z with my stepfather I am well aware that a single fight being doled out across weeks or potentially even months can be on the draining side, but still, I think so far, One Piece strikes a nice balance. (How this goes in the show I couldn’t tell you, given that I’m not watching said show.)
Not a ton actually happens in this chapter from a “narrative perspective.” Basically it boils down to “Luffy and Zolo cover for Usopp’s little ‘crew’ of kids as he orders them to flee the battlefield with Kaya.” But everything has a nice sense of solid urgency. That it manages to convey that in the still rather economical space of just 20 or so pages is pretty impressive. (Get used to that observation, I don’t think it’s the first time I’ve made it here and it will almost certainly not be the last.)
Take for example, the mostly-comical Butchie getting a chance to slam into the ground with enough force to do that “rocks and terrain explode everywhere” thing that people (including myself) are so fond of.
“What happened to the ground?!” “My parents took it down because I’m grounded :/”
Or even this on-its-face silly scene where the pirate kids wail on a still-laid-flat Captain Kuro with sticks. Sure, it’s funny, but he could straight-up disembowel those children if he wanted to. That’s a scary notion!
Especially since Kuro is only wounded to the extent of feeling the need to remark that Luffy slugging him in the face “smarted.” (What is he, a British schoolboy?)
Usopp certainly knows the score, as he spends several pages trying to get the kids (and Kaya) to run away.
Eventually, he convinces them to by framing it as an order from their ‘captain,’ which is pretty clever. I don’t know if I’ve properly conveyed this but I really have come around on Usopp since his introduction, it’s clear he cares a lot for these people and (spoiler alert here) I know from prior knowledge that he joins the main cast eventually, so I’m interested to see what he adds to their dynamic when he does. (He also gets an amusing and very literal cheap shot at Django, here, which is mostly worth noting because it literally makes the big bad hypno-pirate say “owie.”)
None of this is to say our other heroes don’t get a minute to shine here, though, because they do. Specifically, Luffy and Zolo pull off a pretty badass “you shall not pass” sort of moment when intercepting Django, who’s been ordered to pursue Kaya and the kids.
And the chapter ends there, leaving what will become of the heiress and Usopp’s little buddies a question for tomorrow. See you then, pirates.
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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!
Today’s chapter is a terrific little tornado of tough-talk, tussling, and takedowns. First of all; if you were worried about Nami yesterday, well, don’t be. Luffy happens to (quite accidentally) get between Django’s chakram and Nami’s very vulnerable body. Unlike Nami, Luffy can take a blade to the head just fine.
Average Abdullah the Butcher match aftermath.
Not that he won’t complain. In fact, the speech bubble for his yell is so loud that it’s larger than the panel!
The real development of this chapter though is Kaya arriving on the scene. She calls out to her former butler to stop all this, but, predictably, it does not help.
She even just tries to buy Captain Kuro and his crew off, but because Kuro is a villain in a shonen manga, that doesn’t work either.
Kaya pulls out a gun in response to that little comment, but Kuro successfully rattles her by listeing off all the things he’s done for her, and making it clear that he hated every minute of it. Then he goes on the defensive, and Usopp tries to cut in to prevent him from hurting Kaya, despite his being rather unsuited to the task.
But then, well, someone else gets the drop on him.
He’s gonna feel that in the morning.
The chapter ends with that explosive pop from Luffy. I imagine Kuro will have something to say about that tomorrow.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
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