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One Piece Volume 56

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By Eiichiro Oda. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

Oh boy, where to start? First of all, this review contains big spoilers for this volume of One Piece. Seriously big spoilers. Only read this if you know what gets revealed at the end.

I’d mentioned the cover arcs in my last MMF piece, so I should note that starting here we do begin to see what the rest of the crew are doing while Luffy is busy rescuing Ace. These range from the funny (Sanji, Usopp) to the serious (Robin) to the mysterious (Franky), but each are only two ‘cover pages’ long. I suspect Oda had to be thinking of the anime here, and was suggesting what happened in order to allow the filler that must inevitably come to stretch out and tell a relevant story.

I also rarely mention the SBS questions, but they’re always fun, and two here are particularly relevant. First, someone asks Oda to draw the Straw-Hats gender-reversed, which he does. This led to a fanart EXPLOSION in Japan, which is still ongoing in many ways. Secondly, Oda was asked what ‘Nationality’ the Straw Hats were, should they be in our world. His answers actually make a lot of sense and work very well. Except for Brook being Australian, which… whuh?

In any case, the manga itself. There’s a lot of things happening here, so I’ll just touch on a few points. Mr. 2 has never been more awesome than we see here, and his final sacrifice to allow the others to escape is incredibly moving both on and off the page. Blackbeard gets to show off his evil crew here, and I was pleased to note that we once again see what a total wuss he is when it comes to pain, something that has come up before and will again. Of course, when you have his powers, that’s not necessarily fatal.

Buggy and Mr. 3 both semi-reluctantly join the breakout, and both have oddly similar arcs, in that they spend the entire time whining and bitching, but tend to step up at odd times with their own strengths (and they do have some). Mr. 3’s wax powers can slow Magellan, even if only for a little bit, and seeing Luffy wearing wax boxing gloves and legs is, as he notes, awesome. Meanwhile, Buggy is a failure on every level, as is lampshaded by the entire cast. He was on Roger’s crew, but has amounted to only a minor pirate. And yet he has a guile that, once it can overcome his basic cowardice and petulance, is a terrific force. When Buggy decides a course of action can benefit him most, he can be an amazing leader. And he now has a huge crew of criminal pirates who, thanks to various misunderstanding, think he’s the Messiah. Yes, this is a comedic plot, but it’s handled realistically – I really enjoy it.

And so we finally pull away from Impel Down, and head for Marineford, where Ace is about to be executed. This execution is, oddly, being simulcast all over the entire world, to all four Blues and the Grand Line. (Gotta love transponder snails, which seem to be able to do more every time they appear.) It’s beginning to be slightly ridiculous that the World Government is devoting so many resources and so much time to executing Ace. And then Fleet Admiral Sengoku tells us why it’s so important that Ace be executed in so obvious a fashion. Because of Ace’s father, Gold Roger. This blew every fan away when it first came out, and even now the impact is tremendous. Leaving aside the realism of a woman carrying her baby an extra year to throw off suspicion (seriously badass, I might note), this means that Ace is not merely a pirate, or one of Whitebeard’s crew, but a symbol of piracy itself. THIS is why everything is so public.

And of course, we aren’t done yet. Ace has been insisting, even as he kneels at the execution place, that Whitebeard is his true father. And naturally, this means that Whitebeard shows up, right in the middle of everything, to save his son. To be continued. And yes, now we wait some more. THe speedup spoiled us all, I think, and it’s very difficult to wait for May for our next One Piece fix. But I have no doubt whatsoever that it will be epic.

MMF: One Piece

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By Eiichiro Oda. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

This essay will have spoilers through the current tankobon released by Viz (Volume 55), but I will try to avoid spoiling beyond that.

I’d like to talk to you about an epic tale. Well, a series of epic tales, really, but bound together by a bunch of pirates (and a few Marines), some big battles, a few horrid villains, and an incredible love of adventure. Lessons are learned, people make friends of their enemies, and we see things we’d never expected to see. I refer, of course, to the ‘title page’ stories that take place, one panel a week, within the confines of Oda’s larger work, One Piece.

Title pages, of course, are ubiquitous in all manga, be it shonen or otherwise. Most of the time they’re the hero or heroine striking a pose, or a shot of them being casual. Perhaps they’re dramatically staring if it’s a serious chapter. And indeed Oda has these in the series as well, as in between each story arc in the title page sequences we have shots of the Straw Hat Pirates interacting with various fantastic animals somewhere on the Grand Line. And, of course, he has the 2-page color spreads once every 2 months or so, where we see the crew together having some beyond the impossible adventure, usually with even more fantastical animals.

But the story arcs that began in the midst of the Captain Kuro arc, showing Captain Buggy trying to get back his missing body parts and reunite with his crew, are something special. At first I took them to be pure comedy, not mattering much to the plot. I wasn’t expecting to see Buggy again, and he wasn’t exactly one of the Big Bads of the series, even at that point. The same applied to the arcs with Jango and Hatchan, both minor mooks in their boss’s respective arcs, and both far too silly to take seriously. Even the arcs with Coby and Helmeppo learning to be strong Marines, which had an amusing Admiral who wore a dog-eared (literally) hat didn’t faze me. It was amusing, but felt inconsequential.

This was partly as I wasn’t paying as much attention (Viz’s Shonen Jump did not help, as it cuts one of every 3 title pages to save paper – which ruins each and every arc), but partly as I wasn’t expecting to HAVE to. Who drops massive hints and has suggestions of future major plot arcs in their one panel per chapter gag pages? Well, Oda does, of course. Buggy is saved in his arc by Alvida, and they decide to join forces. This then comes up 45 chapters later when the crew arrive at Logue Town and meet them. Coby and Helmeppo’s Admiral who takes a shine to them is none other than Admiral Garp, one of the high-ranking marines… and Luffy’s grandfather, something we discover 350 chapters later. Jango joins the Marines, and returns at the end of the Baroque Works arc. Hatchan’s arc with his cute mermaid girl turns out to be highly important in the Sabaody arc, and so forth.

Essentially, Oda’s story is so epic that he can’t actually tell it all in the 18 pages provided to him every week. Every single title page arc has turned out to either have major plot points or foreshadowing for later volumes, with the exceptions of Wapol, Gedatsu and Eneru, and I’m fully expecting those to come up later as well. What’s more, they’re a story well-told. We see, over the course of single panels with no dialogue, exactly what we get from One Piece every week. Big, goofy villains, epic battles, lots of fun laughs, befriending enemies, and following your dreams.

That last bit is most important. Oda once said in an interview that Luffy doesn’t believe in killing his enemies, he’d rather destroy their dreams. And indeed, most of the protagonists in these stories start off with absolutely nothing, and go through tremendous trials. But in the end, we see new dreams from each of them, as if Luffy’s destruction has given them freedoms they were never able to pursue before. Helmeppo’s decision to stop being a whiner and train to be a good marine, Hachan’s octopus shop, Baroque Works reopening their coffee shop… isn’t that better than trying to kill people and take over the world?

As I noted, the arcs start with the minor, sillier villains. To a degree, there’s some of this in later arcs – I’m sure Oda drew Gedatsu’s hot spring adventures simply as Gedatsu was such a loony that he wanted to do more with him. And I suppose Wapol might qualify as this at first. But Wapol’s arc was the first one to startle me, as he was a nasty jerk. His arc was kind of like if Oda had done an arc with Kuro, or Arlong. And indeed this arc seems to delight in torturing Wapol, who’s now homeless and essentially eating garbage. And yet he finds something he can do, something that brings happiness to children. And more importantly, brings money to Wapol. This then leads to scientists examining him and finding he can create an amazing new metal. He starts a factory, and is even richer than he once was. Oh, and he marries Miss Universe. Note Wapol is not redeemed, per se – it’s implied that he’s going to be as ruthless in big business as he was in taking over a kingdom.

The Baroque Works and CP9 arcs also feature villains who were more hateful than goofy, and shows some of them actually getting happy endings. But it really reaches its zenith with Eneru’s great space adventure. Eneru is a rather unique villain in One Piece. While he enjoyed tormenting the residents of Skypeia, his goal is not shattered when Luffy and the others free the Skypeians from his brutal dictatorship. Instead, Eneru’s ship survives, albeit battered, and he flies off to the moon. We see what happens when he gets there in the title page arc. Any idea you might have that Eneru is going to discover his inner fluffy lamb is crushed here. Most of the plot is fueled by either his random cruelty, his desire for revenge (after his ship is destroyed), or an honest-to-God curiosity about what the heck is going on here. In the end, he succeeds in reviving the robot mole race that was in suspended animation underground. He also finds that he seems to be descended from their creators. The final panel is that of Eneru, standing proud, with his giant army of moon people who worship him at his side. Clearly for Eneru, karmic retribution is something that happens to other people.

Honestly, I could go on forever. There’s just as much brilliant imagery here as there is in the series – indeed, sometimes it gets even weirder. There’s much-needed character development that’s given here so he doesn’t have to waste time on it later. Most of all, Oda has found a way to pack every single part of One Piece with adventure, even taking over the title pages to tell awesome stories. One Piece overflows with ideas from every corner. One Piece makes you care about its worst villains. One Piece is awesome.

One Piece Volume 55

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By Eiichiro Oda. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

Another volume of One Piece where there’s just so much happening I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s try to hit the high points. (This review will contain spoilers for the volume.)

First off, Luffy quickly ends up battling Magellan. And gets his ass handed to him. Not since Smoker have we seen Luffy so defeated, only here there’s no Dragon to interrupt things. This doesn’t feel like a temporary setback, mostly as Magellan doesn’t feel like a Big Bad – he’s a jailer trying to do his job, even if his job is sending Ace to be executed. And so Luffy tries all his attacks, and is simply poisoned to near-death. It’s awe-inspiring.

Luckily, Mister 2 finds he cannot desert Luffy in his time of need, and impersonates Hannyabal to rescue him and try to get him to safety. Which involves a lot of wolves and ice-covered forests, but they eventually get there… New Kama Land. This leads us to our next big character introduction, that of Ivankov. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised at his appearance. Given Oda based a villain off of Eminem, it goes without saying that he’d base a hero off of Tim Curry. Sort of. And with the Hormone Fruit, we get another Devil Fruit which is both scarily appropriate and utterly ridiculous.

Two more things here: First, even though the transgenders and transvestites in this volume are clearly treated with an air of over the top comedy, it’s also clear that Oda has no disrespect for them at all, and they are in fact rebel heroes. I like this. Second, at one point Ivankov transforms an angry radical trying to kill him into a cute girl, showing he can switch people’s genders. This idea took Japanese and North American fandom by storm, leading to fake spoilers where we see female Luffy ready to break out of Impel Down, to Oda responding further in Volume 56. And let’s not even get into the ‘Crocodile was originally a woman’ theories…

Ah yes, Crocodile, aka the reason I put up the spoiler warning. I have to say, Oda loves to delight us with the unexpected, and nothing is quite as unexpected as perhaps the most popular Big Bad teaming up with our heroes, even if it’s just for a chance to get at Whitebeard. Unlike the cover page arcs, showing the minor villains learning the error of their ways, Crocodile is not particularly sorry or repentant – he just wants a fight, and freedom. Luffy is understandably unmoved, but Ivankov points out they need all the big guns they can get – and he’s right. Even better, this also means they free Jimbei, the Worlord and Fish-man who was imprisoned by the World Government for not going along with their plans.

And with this, we prepare to bust out of Impel Down. But that will have to wait for the next exciting installment of One Piece! Coming in February!