• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Comment Policy
    • Disclosures & Disclaimers
  • Resources
    • Links, Essays & Articles
    • Fandomology!
    • CLAMP Directory
    • BlogRoll
  • Features & Columns
    • 3 Things Thursday
    • Adventures in the Key of Shoujo
    • Bit & Blips (game reviews)
    • BL BOOKRACK
    • Bookshelf Briefs
    • Bringing the Drama
    • Comic Conversion
    • Fanservice Friday
    • Going Digital
    • It Came From the Sinosphere
    • License This!
    • Magazine no Mori
    • My Week in Manga
    • OFF THE SHELF
    • Not By Manga Alone
    • PICK OF THE WEEK
    • Subtitles & Sensibility
    • Weekly Shonen Jump Recaps
  • Manga Moveable Feast
    • MMF Full Archive
    • Yun Kouga
    • CLAMP
    • Shojo Beat
    • Osamu Tezuka
    • Sailor Moon
    • Fruits Basket
    • Takehiko Inoue
    • Wild Adapter
    • One Piece
    • After School Nightmare
    • Karakuri Odette
    • Paradise Kiss
    • The Color Trilogy
    • To Terra…
    • Sexy Voice & Robo
  • Browse by Author
    • Melinda Beasi
    • Brigid Alverson
    • Sean Gaffney
    • Anna Neatrour
    • Michelle Smith
    • Travis Anderson
    • Phillip Anthony
    • Paul Beasi
    • Derek Bown
    • Katherine Dacey
    • Jaci Dahlvang
    • Angela Eastman
    • Erica Friedman
    • Sara K.
    • Megan Purdy
    • Emily Snodgrass
    • Nancy Thistlethwaite
    • Eva Volin
    • David Welsh
  • MB Blogs
    • A Case Suitable For Treatment
    • Experiments in Manga
    • MangaBlog
    • The Manga Critic
    • Manga Report
    • Soliloquy in Blue
    • Manga Curmudgeon (archive)

Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

One Piece

3 Reasons to Read One Piece

December 2, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

Why would any sane person commit to reading a series that’s still going strong after sixty volumes? I can think of three compelling reasons why you should set aside your shonophobia — that’s Latin for “fear of incredibly long series with interminable fight scenes and characters who do their best” — and give Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece a shot.

1. THE ARTWORK

Though many shonen manga-ka love to populate their stories with flamboyantly ugly villains, Eiichiro Oda’s character designs are more memorable than his competitors’. That’s because Oda doesn’t just add a few scars and a crazy hairdo to distinguish the bad guys from the good; he creates every villain from scratch, making each garment, prop, tattoo, wart, and weapon a direct reflection of the character’s personality and personal history. The same goes for other supporting players: Oda emphasizes the greenness of one pirate’s kiddie followers by giving them vegetal hairdos, and the isolation of a pirate castaway by stuffing the character’s body into an empty treasure chest, with only Gaimon’s unkempt hair and feet poking out. (Gaimon gets one of the series’ best lines: “I used to have two eyebrows!” he exclaims, musing on his twenty years stranded on a remote island.)

Oda’s entire approach to drafting shows a similar thoughtfulness: his pirate ships, tropical islands, and sea coast villages are rendered in clean lines, with a minimum of screen tone. Oda relies instead on playful shapes to help set the stage, from a sea-going restaurant that looks like a cross between a carp and a Hong Kong dim sum parlor, to an island populated by rabbit-cobras, pig-lions, and rooster-foxes.

The only blind spot in Oda’s artwork is his female characters. Though he can draw a marvelous, gnarled pirate queen, as gloriously repulsive as any of the series’ other villains, his young, attractive girls are blandly interchangeable. Even as more female characters are introduced in later story arcs, their appearance seems more calculated to satisfy the male gaze than reveal much about their personality — besides, of course, the near-universal tendency among shonen artists to make a girl’s bust- and neckline a reliable predictor of her villainy.

2. THE LOVING SEND-UPS OF SHONEN CLICHES

One of the reasons I don’t read more shonen manga: I find the characters’ compulsion to shout the name of their fighting techniques kind of silly. (OK, a lot silly.) If anything, it brings back memories of the old Super Friends TV show in which the Wonder Twins clinked rings and announced that they’d be taking “the form of an ice sled!” or “the form of a green-striped tiger!” (If that was meant to be comedy and not a complete abdication of imagination on the writer’s part, I missed it.) Granted, InuYasha and Naruto boast cooler-sounding and more effectual powers, but the minute InuYasha yells “Wind Scar!”, I’m ripped out of the scene, pondering the need for such verbal displays.

In One Piece, however, Oda pokes fun at the practice by assigning his characters goofy powers with goofy names that are fun to say. Monkey D. Luffy’s Gum-Gum attacks are the most frequent and obvious example, as he pretzels himself into a Looney Tunes assortment of weapons and shields, but his crew mates also have a few tricks up their sleeves. The best of them, by far, is Tony Tony Chopper, a blue-nosed reindeer who also happens to be the ship’s doctor. His Human-Human powers enable him to assume a variety of forms, including a gargantuan were-reindeer that wouldn’t be out of place in the pages of Lycanthrope Leo.

Oda also walks a fine line between openly mocking his hero and using him to exemplify the “friendship, effort, and victory” motto that undergirds every Shonen Jump title. Monkey is, to put it nicely, one of the dumbest shonen heroes in the canon — and that’s part of his charm. Unlike, say, Naruto or Lag Seeing (of Tegami Bachi fame), Monkey’s single-minded pursuit of treasure is portrayed as a kind of insanity, not a sign of a stellar character. Monkey goes to extreme lengths to prove himself — not unusual for a shonen hero — but his behavior is clearly meant to be ridiculous. (In the very first pages of the series, he stabs himself in the face with a knife to demonstrate his imperviousness to pain, much to the horror of the assembled pirates.) Yet for all his ill-advised bravado, he’s a kind-hearted goof; anyone who demonstrates valor or integrity is invited to join his crew, regardless of the original circumstances under which they met Monkey. Again, those qualities don’t make Monkey unique, but they do make him appealing; he’s an indestructible hero who’s utterly fallible.

3. THE EXCELLENT ADAPTATION

Any text as thick with puns and pirate-speak as One Piece runs the risk of falling flat in translation, but the English-language adaptation is fluid, funny, and eminently readable. I can’t gauge how faithfully the VIZ edition adheres to the original Japanese, but the script’s buoyant, goofy tone complements the artwork perfectly, leading me to think that VIZ’s editorial team has given American audiences a reasonable approximation of the Japanese-language reading experience. Heck, they’ve even made Oda’s reader correspondence sound like a real, mischievous person answered those fan letters. Now that’s a good adaptation.

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, Recommended Reading, REVIEWS Tagged With: Comedy, One Piece, Pirates, Shonen, Shonen Jump, VIZ

One Piece, Vols. 1-3

June 27, 2010 by Melinda Beasi 10 Comments

One Piece, Vols. 1-3
By Eiichiro Oda
Published by Viz Media
Rated T (Teen)

Monkey D. Luffy wants to be the king of the pirates, but after accidentally eating the mysterious Gum-Gum fruit, his body turns to rubber, ensuring he’ll never be able to swim! Nothing deters Luffy, though, and soon he’s headed off to seek his fortune in the footsteps of his idol, Captain “Red-Haired” Shanks. His goal? To make his way through the infamous Grand Line to seek the greatest pirate treasure of all time, One Piece.

The series’ first three volumes follow Luffy on a series of adventures as he attempts to gather a crew for his trek. Using his rubber-man skills (which come with special names like “gum-gum pistol”) he manages to defeat a corrupt navy captain and two cruel, selfish pirate captains with the help of the crew members he picks up along the way. “Cruel” and “selfish” are key words here, because what sets Luffy and his crew apart from the other pirates they meet is their lack of interest in pillaging and intimidating ordinary folk in order to get what they want.

By the end of the third volume, Luffy has collected two volunteers for his crew. First comes Zolo, a former bounty hunter who aims to be the greatest swordsman on earth. Later, they meet Nami, a master thief and skilled navigator who is determined to find the One Piece herself. Neither are obvious candidates for piracy when Luffy meets them. Zolo, after all, makes his living hunting pirates for money. And Nami hates pirates, to whom she lost someone dear long ago. Fortunately, whether they intend to or not, everybody likes Luffy.

And who can blame them? Luffy’s a cockeyed optimist, but more than that, he’s just an incredibly confident guy, and not in the spastic or swaggering manner of so many shonen heroes. The unearthly, smiling calm with which he faces challenges like getting sucked into an ocean whirlpool or being shot at with a canon would inspire faith in anyone. The series offers action and fighting galore, but its true strength is its grinning hero who simply takes everything as it comes.

Not that Luffy’s the only draw. Though these early volumes follow a fairly strict formula, there is enough heart to keep it from becoming tiresome. One story involving a pet store watchdog who faithfully guards the store after his master’s death is particularly touching. Also, the series’ supporting characters are exceptionally well-developed, even just within the first three volumes, and there is obviously much more about them to be revealed.

The series’ greatest weakness at this point is that its strict adherence to formula keeps any of the overblown villains Luffy faces from actually being scary. There’s no doubt at all when reading these volumes that Luffy will prevail (as always), with no major casualties among those he cares about. As a result, though the series is incredibly fun and filled with exciting action and hi-jinx, there’s never any real sense of danger. While this is perfectly fine in the short-term, as a new reader, it will be interesting to see how/if this changes over the course of the series and whether it’s enough to hold my attention.

With 58 volumes published in Japan and more on the way, One Piece has more than proven its staying power. I certainly look forward to more!

Review copy provided by the publisher. This review is a part of Shonen Sundays, a collaborative project with Michelle Smith. Buy this book at Amazon.com

Just a quick personal note: Since this is the last of our Shonen Sundays posts, I’d like to thank Michelle for inviting me into this idea of hers and for recommending two great series for me to enjoy! It’s been a great shonen-filled month. Thanks to all of you, too, for indulging us!

Filed Under: MANGA REVIEWS Tagged With: One Piece, shonen sunday

  • « Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
 | Log in
Copyright © 2010 Manga Bookshelf | Powered by WordPress & the Genesis Framework