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!
Unsurprisingly, Buggy the Clown is not dead. But in contrast to last chapter’s pure, streamlined punch-and-stab machine, this chapter is a bit more all over the place. Not in a bad way, but it’s a lot less Just One Thing than yesterday’s.
Mainly, we learn a couple things here; about Red-Hair Shanks, about Buggy the Clown, and about the Devil Fruits themselves, which, it’s becoming increasingly obvious if it weren’t already, are the manga’s central plot tokens.
It’s worth taking an aside here to point this out; it seems like Mayor Boodle’s bravery has inspired his citizens, and they arm themselves while preparing to fight Buggy off. They don’t arrive at the site of the battle in this chapter, though. My guess is we’ll circle back on them tomorrow.
Much more of the chapter is taken up by a flashback from Buggy, where we see a slice of his youth serving as an “apprentice” aboard a pirate ship. We also learn why he ate the Devil Fruit in the first place and why he doesn’t like Shanks. In order, he ate it because he was trying to steal it, and he doesn’t like Shanks because Shanks saved his life. No, that was not a typo. Why did he want to steal the Devil Fruit? Turns out, a lot of people will pay good money for superpowers if the only downside is that they can’t swim.
Assuming a “berry” is roughly about a yen, a hundred million of them is about $743,000 USD. If it’s actually closer in value to a US dollar, then it’s about $100,000,000 USD.
Buggy, via an ill-considered harebrained scheme, ends up both accidentally eating the fruit and nearly drowning. Shanks has to save him, and in spite of that, Buggy ends up blaming him for the failure of his get-rich-quick plan. This is the rare shonen flashback that actually manages to make a character even less sympathetic than they already were, it almost comes across as parodic. (Obviously, that’s intentional, but still, it’s pretty funny.)
Importantly, though, it does establish that Buggy’s fixation on literal gold-and-jewels-style treasure is deep-rooted. Which makes it make sense when he actually cuts and runs from his fight with Luffy. Literally! He pops the top half of his body off and flies at Nami like some kind of cutlass-wielding aerial drone, a shot on which the chapter ends.
Tomorrow: Buggy vs. the thief of pirates!
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!
Something I like about One Piece is that it has a certain “ah, just one more chapter” quality to it, at least in the format I’m reading it in. As I write this it’s a few minutes shy of 2AM local, and I should really probably be in bed, but I seriously want to know how this fight between Zolo and Cabaji went, so here I am, reading another chapter at two hours past midnight.
My utterly dreadful sleeping habits aren’t the focus of this column, though. Watching Zolo fuck Cabaji up is.1 And to that end, we get a really great page right near the top of the chapter here, complete with Cabaji dropping an old-timey pirate insult.
To be fair it’s not literally all about these two. Somewhere in here, Nanami sneaks off, assuring Luffy that she’s happy to team up with him….if he can get ahold of Buggy’s treasure and the map of the Grand Line, that is.
Far be it from me to criticize perhaps the most successful mangaka of all time, but what’s going on with Nami’s hand there?
But apart from that little aside, this is very much the Cabaji and Zolo show.
Buggy’s second mate leads with a bunch of crazy, vaguely “circus”-themed bullshit like this.
And Zolo counters by being a much better swordsman than Cabaji is. Eventually, Cabaji has to resort to cheating, and Buggy tries to ‘subtly’ help out his third-in-command. A classic heel move, but it doesn’t work. Luffy is still around, after all.
The trickery doesn’t help, and despite literally bleeding out the entire time, Zolo trounces Cabaji. Eventually finishing him off in what is probably the single best page of the whole chapter.
Proving that he isn’t actually an immortal sword demon and instead just fights like one, Zolo collapses from blood loss shortly thereafter, leaving Luffy and Buggy to finish the fight on their own.
And then, just as Volume II draws to a close, Buggy drops this particular bombshell.
And much as I am genuinely dying to know what’s up with all of that, it’s probably time for this old sea hag to turn in for the evening. (Besides, I’m leaning a little too heavily on screencaps, which is always a sign that it’s probably time to stop here for the day.) Before I do though, now that we’re two volumes and a couple weeks deep, I just wanted to ask how you’re all feeling about the project so far. Please sound off in the comments (or on my Retrospring) about any thoughts you might have; positive, negative, whatever they may be.
I look forward to hearing from you. See you tomorrow for the start of Volume III, pirates! 🏴☠️
1: A danger of late-night writing: I forgot the “is” in this sentence when I first wrote it and only noticed it later. This would be a very different kind of column if that were what happened in this chapter!
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!
Alright, so I accidentally lied yesterday! Today’s chapter is less about the fight between Buggy and Luffy—presumably, that’s still to come—and more about the fight between Zolo and Buggy’s third-in-command Cabaji, who we met yesterday.
There is a little bit of Luffy-centric material, though. Especially when Nami freaks out about his balloon stunt from yesterday’s chapter. (And hey, to be fair to her; I would too.)
But yeah, mostly this chapter concerns the locking of blades between Zolo and Cabaji.
Despite Cabaji’s ‘noble blademaster’ posturing, he’s as dirty as the rest of Buggy’s crew, and he spends a lot of this chapter deliberately trying to re-open Zolo’s wounds.
But if Cabaji thinks that doing so will even out the fight, or even make Zolo an easy target, he’s sadly mistaken.
Live Buggy Reaction
Zolo actually does the rest of Cabaji’s job for him, deliberately injuring himself, just to prove that he doesn’t need to be on level ground with Cabaji to take him down. This kind of hot-blooded vainglorious nonsense is exactly what makes manga like this worth reading.
This pic goes hard, feel free to screenshot.
Once again, this chapter is mostly action (and that looks like it will continue to be the case for at least a little while longer), so I don’t exactly have a ton to say. But certainly, it’s a good chapter; solid, entertaining, and pulpy, exactly what you want out of your weekly comics. (They’re daily for us, but we’ll ignore that little foible.)
For lack of anywhere else to put it I do also want to mention the impressive opening sequence where Buggy uses his crewmen as human shields. Why do they like him again? Oh, but it is such a cool page. Maybe that’s why.
Tomorrow: The two swordsmen battle 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.
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!
After a few chapters in a row where quite a bit happens, today’s is refreshingly straightforward. There’s only two real events that occur here; Mayor Boodle decides to take the fight to Buggy, and Nami allies with—although she’s very hesitant to use words like “join”—Luffy’s crew.
Boodle has a decent motive for wanting Buggy & Co. out of town; he helped build the place!
To me, this entire sequence raises tons of questions, and I’m not sure if they’re questions One Piece is interested in answering. This patch of land is one thing, but in general, where did these people come from? Where have they arrived at? Is this a “Europeans crossing the Atlantic for the first time” situation or something more innocuous? Are there natives? If so, where are they?
Many, many questions, and few answers. Maybe One Piece will eventually answer some or all of these questions, but it’s far from a certainty. For now, at least for me, they’re just something I will keep in the back of my mind.
More importantly, there’s a pretty funny sequence earlier on in the chapter where Mohji, stumbling back aboard Buggy’s ship, tries to warn his captain of the “rubber man”, but passes out halfway through his sentence. This leads to some misunderstandings.
And the chapter also establishes that Chou-Chou is fine. In fact, him ending up back at the shelter tips off the townspeople that their mayor has gone and done something reckless. They are absolutely correct about this, as previously established.
Boodle’s situation would probably be hopeless did he not have some backup; namely, Luffy and a newly recovered Zolo.
And even Nami, in her own way, offers something like support.
And just to not leave anyone out; the mayor himself is no slouch. I haven’t really talked much about Boodle because as someone who’s not even quite 30 yet, the whole “spending 40 years building a community only to have it destroyed” motive is a bit abstract to me. But it is executed well, and that means that at the end of the chapter, when he has a dock-to-ship stare-off with Buggy, he earns being drawn in that classically sketchy shonen style that conveys that someone is about 90% burning justice by volume.
Tomorrow: Luffy’s crew and the iron-willed mayor vs. Buggy the Clown and his circus on a ship.
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!
A theory I’m putting forward to you all; Mohji is the worst character in One Piece so far.
I know! It’s probably controversial, but bear with me here. What kind of heartless motherfucker picks a fight witha dog? Not a big scary threatening dog that is in your way, just a random dog guarding a random building that you have no interest in and your pet lion only kind of does. What kind of person does that? Mohji, apparently. I hate Mohji. Fuck him.
But pick a fight with Chou-Chou is exactly what Mohji does, and as such the first third or so of today’s chapter is a fight sequence where Chou-Chou and Mohji’s lion Richie duke it out. Through sheer moxie, and the loving memory of his owner, Chou-Chou manages to not just survive but to actually hold Richie off for a time. And I know that love for his owner is what’s motivating Chou-Chou here, because of the technique here used where the panels are aligned into strips that seem to “fade in and out” by getting narrower and wider, representative of the memories coursing through Chou-Chou’s mind as he fights.
But even though Chou-Chou is a very good dog, he’s still going to struggle against a lion (much less a jacked anime lion), so at some point, off-panel, Mohji burns the store to the ground.
Worst character in One Piece so far, I rest my case.
Unfortunately, Mohji fails to account for Luffy, who is A) very much still alive and B) very, very upset at Mohji for taking Chou-Chou’s “treasure” from him. In a display of karma so quick it’d give you whiplash, Luffy piledrives Mohji’s lion into the dirt, and doesn’t take much longer to deal with Mohji himself.
You wouldn’t like Luffy when he’s angry.
Mohji joins his pet lion face-down in the dirt soon after.
All of this is small consolation to Chou-Chou, though, who after all, cannot get the building—or his master—back.
Nami, in particular, is not impressed by all this.
But it is worth pointing out her inching toward pirate-acceptance here. Pivoting from the above, and a whole lot of “fight me, bro”-isms flung in Luffy’s direction, to this….
….just a few pages later. Again, I like to call out clever technique like this when I see it. By slipping this bit in here, Oda prevents any “dead pages”—stuffing, essentially. Devoid of meaningful narrative or visual content—just to reach a page count, a thing that many mangaka seem to struggle with.
In general, I think the saga of Chou-Chou the dog—who departs toward the end of the chapter here, possibly toward the refugee shelter Boodle mentioned in the last chapter—is my favorite of the small story arcs we’ve seen so far. I’m sure it will eventually be dethroned, but I’m a sucker for tales of animal loyalty, so it may be a bit before that happens.
Back on his ship, Buggy the Clown learns of Mohji’s demise, and is not pleased.
I DO NOT WANT TO READY THE BUGGY BALLS.
Tomorrow: No more clowning around!
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.
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, we’re introduced to three new characters; a villainous lion-tamer, the mayor of the city Buggy and his lackeys have ransacked, and a dog. Working out which of these three has the most impact to the plot is left as an exercise to the reader. But I’ll give you a hint; it somehow isn’t this guy.
That’s not to say that Mohji isn’t important. Nor to say that Boodle—the mayor—isn’t, either. But the real star of this chapter is that dog, Chou-Chou.
This is a bit of an odd thing that I’ve noticed One Piece likes to do, introduce several characters at once, sometimes dropping their backstory on us like a sack of wrenches, and then resuming the current main plot either in the back half of the chapter’s page count or in the next one entirely. It’s not an approach I dislike, but it’s one I don’t see in much else—if this isn’t abundantly clear by now, I don’t read a ton of other shonen—so I’ve had to get a bit used to it. (And who’s to say if it’ll even still apply, a hundred chapters from now?)
You may remember that yesterday ended with Zolo in pretty bad shape, bleeding out as he hauled Luffy off to flee from Buggy’s crew. Luffy himself is still stuck in the cage he’s been imprisoned in as the chapter starts, and Nami seems a bit exasperated with the both of them.
All’s well that ends well, though, because she stole the key to the cage, so Luffy can break out with no issues. Problem solved, right?
Well, no. Remember that dog?
Munch squad.
Boodle shows up not long after, explaining that Chou-Chou has been fighting off Buggy’s crew all on his own. Why? To protect the pet food store owned by his late master, who passed away a few months before the events of this arc of an unspecified illness. I’m super underselling this here, but it’s actually pretty touching, considering how brief it all is. (Or maybe I’m just a sap.)
One Piece also floats an interesting theme here that I suppose it has actually brought up before, but I just haven’t been paying a ton of attention to. The notion of what “treasure” itself actually is. Luffy’s greatest treasure, after all, is the hat given to him by Red-Hair Shanks. Chou-Chou the dog, Mayor Boodle puts forward, sees his late master’s pet food store as a treasure in that it is all that remains of the man. A memento of sorts.
Perhaps I’m just reading too much into it, but I think this is an interesting idea and it’s one I think we should be on the lookout for as we move forward.
In any case, Mohji does eventually make his way to where Luffy and friends are “hiding.” He brags that he can control any animal—a statement initially backed up by the presence of his riding-lion, Richie—but when he tries to take command of Chou-Chou, this happens.
And Luffy continues his unbroken streak of flipping switches on every new villain he meets.
But Mohji doesn’t have much more success against Luffy than he does against Chou-Chou. He orders Richie to maul him, but all the lion succeeds in doing is breaking Luffy out of his cage.
The lion tosses Luffy into a collapsing building, which is enough for Mohji to declare that ‘no one could survive that.’ (He does not have a good command of what manga he’s in, I think.)
When the lion makes a move on the pet food store (presumably hungry for the shelves upon shelves of Meow Mix that lurk within), Chou-Chou growls fearlessly. The chapter ends on this shot of Luffy, ready to bounce back into action, and I’m quite excited to see how all this shakes out tomorrow.
Tomorrow: The Dog, The Monkey, and the Lion!
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.
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!
The introduction art for today’s One Piece is a curious one, which appears to depict Luffy racing against a….I think that’s a cheetah. Is Luffy a Speed Force user? We may never know.
In any case, today’s chapter opens with what was pretty obvious at the tail end of yesterday’s. No, Buggy the Clown is not dead. He survived being cut to bits just fine, a fact that catches Zolo enough off-guard that Buggy’s able to get a nasty stab in with his cutlass. Why don’t I let Buggy himself elucidate?
There are many good things about these three panels, but I think Luffy’s Extremely Look Who’s Talking reaction is my favorite.
Buggy genuinely seems to have our heroes on the ropes. But in the nick of time, Luffy resorts to the most powerful weapon in his arsenal; unintentionally pushing somebody’s buttons.
This is enough to make Buggy so furious that he chucks his hand—he’s still cut to pieces, remember, he’s just not hurt by it—and at Luffy, who then catches Buggy’s cutlass—attached arm and all—between his teeth, because manga is the highest form of art.
Buggy isn’t impressed, and, totally distracted from Zolo and Nami, takes the time to taunt his captive.
This distraction is enough for Zolo and Nami to turn the tables. Almost literally, since the real issue for Buggy’s crew is that Zolo flips their ship’s cannon around, still loaded with one of the—ahem—‘Buggy Balls’, and Nami does the honors of lighting it and wrecking their ship. The three escape in the confusion, while Nami deals with some confusion of her own; after all, why would a pirate risk their own life and limb to save somebody else?
The turnabout is enough to set Buggy, already a pretty angry guy, absolutely seething. And the chapter closes on Zolo, Luffy—still in a cage, mind you—and Nami fleeing into the city as Buggy makes his full intent known.
Tomorrow: Clownwar!
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.
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’s opening art—that’s it up there in the banner—depicts Nami walking side by side with a very cute pig. It’s quite charming, if I do say so.
The chapter itself adds a new dimension to Buggy the Clown’s personality. Yesterday in his proper introduction, he was mostly pretty angry, and it had the effect of making him simultaneously intimidating and more than a little silly. Here, we get another side of his personality; boisterous, as most good pirate captains are.
There’s a pretty good sequence right near the top of the chapter where Nami drinks several of Buggy’s crewmembers under the table. (Because I am, at heart, kind of a mom, I was only able to admire her feat after an initial reaction of “wait a minute, isn’t she too young to drink?” Then I remembered that I was reading an adventure manga about pirates. Moving swiftly along….)
The good times don’t last, though. Buggy’s plan to punish Luffy for “stealing” his map of the Grand Line is to blow him to smithereens. to this end, he orders his crew to do something distinctly unpleasant-sounding.
I Do Not Want To Load The Buggy Balls
We quickly learn what ‘Buggy Balls’ actually are, as Buggy shows them off by firing one from his ship’s cannon, and absolutely wrecking an entire neighborhood of the town in the process. It’s a really impressive looking sequence. There is a certain sheer kinetic energy to the cannonball knocking a hole through a dozen buildings in a row, making them crumple like towers of matchsticks.
Buggy then tells Nami that actually, he’d rather have her light the cannon fuse that blasts Luffy into oblivion. As a test of loyalty, sure—I doubt Buggy is as easy to fool as Nami’s assumed—but also just because he can. If the fact that he gets kicks out of this kind of thing wasn’t obvious already, it’s made so when he doubles down on the order, with a panel that—and I say this with love—I am genuinely shocked never became a meme.
The visuals assume a panicky quality here, as Nami tries to stall for time while trying to figure out what she should do as Buggy and his crew heckle her and her hands shake.
The egging-on, both from Buggy’s crew and from Luffy himself (who tells her she can’t expect to tangle with pirates without putting her life on the line, probably true), eventually wears her to the breaking point. She impressively flips over the crewman trying to show her out to light the cannon, and yells this.
Which is a really nice, economical slice of character-building, only slightly undercut by Luffy explaining the barely-subtext in the immediately following panel.
Live Luffy reaction.
She doesn’t have to fight alone for long, Zolo makes his grand return just moments later. Buggy takes an immediate interest in the ex-pirate hunter, which Zolo does not return, to say the least.
I really love the “DOOOOOM” sound effect in the background there.
The clown pirate doesn’t initially appear to put up much of a fight. Almost as soon as Zolo engages with Buggy, he cuts him to ribbons. Is this the end of Buggy the Clown….?
I somehow doubt it. We’ll find out together tomorrow, pirates.
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.
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!
The other day, I settled in to read brand-new Jump serialization Ruri Dragon. I happened to see the magazine’s cover for the issue where the series made its debut, and noticed that, right there in the upper-right corner, looming over Ruri’s titular dragon girl protagonist, is Monkey D. Luffy. Rendered, admittedly, in a mildly frightening style.
I bring this up not just to plug my column on the first Ruri chapter (although you should read that, if you like these columns), but because it’s a serious testament to One Piece‘s longevity. A real reminder of just what, exactly, we’re all in for here. There it is, getting second billing on the cover of the same magazine it debuted in 25 years earlier. It’s kind of astonishing, in a way! Just something to keep in the back of your head as we start the second volume today. The second volume of 102 and counting.
I’m going to take a moment to discuss the chapter-opening splash art from this point onward, because regular commenter Robinhood recently informed me that they are actually canon to the manga itself, and sometimes cross into its main events. This one, for our chapter today, is on the chill side, depicting Zolo and Luffy hanging out with a cow. I’m curious about when exactly this is supposed to have happened—maybe after the two defeated Captain Morgan but before they left town?—but it’s a nice scene nonetheless.
The chapter proper is another matter entirely. Quite a bit happens here, but the first thing that gets established is the obvious. We’re introduced to the man after whom this volume is named, Captain Buggy.
I absolutely love his introductory sequence. In just a few pages, we get the sense that he’s powerful but temperamental. Already angered about his stolen map, Buggy uses his devil fruit powers to force-choke a crewman for a completely imagined insult about his nose. Not content to simply suffocate the man, Buggy floats him over in front of his ship’s cannon and, has the rest of his crew fire on the poor sap. That is how you introduce a villain.
He cuts a simultaneously ridiculous and intimidating figure. On the one hand; he’s a pirate clown. On the other hand, the sheer amount of anger he unloads for something so petty actually makes him seem more scary, not less. The heavy shadowing he’s depicted with helps too (a part of me just imagines how much of a pain in the ass getting something to ink like that must be, but it is quite a nice technique).
It becomes clear over the course of the chapter that Buggy and his crew have all but run the townsfolk out of this particular port. People are just that scared of him.
One person who isn’t, though? Nami, who, throughout the 15 or so pages dedicated to her and Luffy’s part of the story here, hatches a scheme to infiltrate Buggy’s crew and make off with his treasure. That’s a bold play, and it comes only at the very end of the chapter. But we get a good sense of who Nami is here, in general. She’s willing to camp out in some abandoned house not far from the tavern where Buggy and co. are making their base, while having stolen from him. That’s pretty gutsy!
Also, perhaps predictably, she and the rather blunt Luffy do not initially get on super well. Especially when Luffy reveals himself as a pirate and Nami makes known her strong distaste of the profession. She also takes offense to the notion that she’s just stealing stuff (or, y’know, houses) that Buggy’s crew have left lying around.
We don’t learn exactly what the deal is with her anti-pirate grudge here, although I suspect we will before too long. (This is ignoring that it’s not like it’s unreasonable to dislike pirates if you’re living during your world’s golden age of piracy. This is a genre manga, there’ll usually be some single, concrete explanation for such things.)
Nami does also reveal the motive behind her double-piracy here. Or at least, she kind of does. Because this is a sort of bonkers thing to say sans context, and she doesn’t really give us that context. It’s a great bit of plotwork, actually, because something this off-beat is pretty much guaranteed to stick in your head until we get an “ohhhh”-inducing explanation some number of chapters or volumes down the line.
Assuming a “berry” is roughly about a yen, a hundred million of them is about $743,000 USD. If it’s actually closer in value to a US dollar, then it’s about $100,000,000 USD.
In general, Nami gets off some pretty great dialogue here. Luffy is almost able to convince her to sign up for his crew by appealing to her skill as a navigator, but she simply can’t ally herself with pirates. (….For now, anyway. I’m sure that will eventually change.)
Also, she says this?
“100,000,000 Berries can buy many tangerines.”
“Explain how.”
“Money can be exchanged for goods and services.”
But in any case, she pretends to eventually acquiesce to Luffy’s need for a navigator, if only he’ll take her to see Buggy the Clown, first. Luffy, somewhat incredibly, agrees to do this. Nami promptly ties him up and offers him to the clown captain as collateral to join his crew.
Spare a thought for the teenagers who read this when it was new and promptly discovered something about themselves.
And on this note, the chapter pretty much ends!
But, don’t worry too much about Luffy. A certain someone is coming to the rescue.
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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!
We open today on a familiar scene; Luffy and a single companion aimlessly adrift at sea. Zolo complains that they really need to get a navigator. He’s got a point, I’d say.
It’s not long before shenanigans ensue; Luffy tries to turn a passing giant bird into dinner. Instead, it ends up carrying him away, separating him from Zolo. Not that the former pirate-hunter has much time to ruminate on loneliness or anything of the sort. As he’s trying to catch up to Luffy, he runs into a trio of pirates adrift at sea. He rescues them. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that he….doesn’t stop them from rescuing themselves?
Of course, the rescued pirates are far from grateful, and we hear for the first time a name that I suspect we’re going to become pretty familiar with.
Of course, Zolo is not one to just roll over because he’s outnumbered.
Subdued, the pirates explain how they got stranded in the middle of the ocean in the first place. Their story, told here through a few flashback pages, introduces us to a new character. This one I know we’ll be seeing a lot of. And if you’re vaguely familiar with One Piece at all, you probably recognize her.
Yes, that’s Nami, one of the handful of other One Piece characters I knew by name before starting this project. I didn’t really know anything about her, though. I certainly didn’t know she was introduced to the comic by swindling a trio of pirates out of their ship with a fake treasure chest.
I think I have a favorite character.
Back in the present, Zolo muses that being able to predict the weather that well would make her one hell of a navigator. I suspect we’ll be circling back around on that notion before too long.
The pirate trio say they work for one Buggy the Clown, who apparently “ate the fruit of the devil” and is the fiercest pirate in the area. (The mention of devil fruit all but confirms my thoughts from a few columns ago. Although, like I said there, it’s kind of obvious when one thinks about it.) They need to get back the map of the Grand Line that Nami stole, or their vicious captain will have their heads. We don’t meet Buggy himself, here, but (small spoiler for the next column, here), the volume that begins with the chapter after this one is named after him. So I’m quite sure we’ll meet him soon.
We do see his ship here, in a bit of very blunt foreshadowing.
Sometimes as a critic you see things that induce a loss for words. “Pirate ship that’s also a circus tent” is one of those things.
Naturally, we link back up with Nami basically immediately.
Her escape from, presumably, more of Buggy’s crew is interrupted when Luffy falls out of the sky, causing a huge commotion.
Nami, in her second defining character moment in the span of 20 pages, immediately takes advantage of the situation by pretending Luffy is her “boss” who’s come to rescue her. (Sidenote: I really love how Oda’s panels tumble in to a jumble of diagonals on this page, it really emphasizes the frantic pace of the scene.)
They don’t actually “have” Luffy “right there”, of course. One of them makes the mistake of swatting his hat, and gets laid flat for his troubles.
Nami, perhaps sensing opportunity, introduces herself shortly after, in the chapter’s last page. Although she can’t know it, she may have not picked the best opening line.
Does that make her some kind of meta-pirate? A double pirate? A pirate pirate? A piratesite? A buccane’er-do-well? A thief of the thieves of the sea?
All in all, I really quite like Nami’s first chapter! Roguish characters who live and die by their wits are always great fun in a story like this, and it gives her a nice contrast with Luffy, whose main approach to problem solving is “punch first, ask questions later.” I wonder how long it’ll take before she joins the main crew?
Regardless, this actually marks the end of the first volume! I was a little surprised by that to be honest, since it seems a bit brief to me, but with 8 chapters each, one of them double length, under our belt, we are already over 200 pages into this story. There are many more to go, of course, many of which will also involve Nami. Personally, I can’t wait.
But what about you? I’m particularly interested in asking my other first-timers here. What do you think of Nami’s introduction?
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.
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.
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