One Piece (ワンピース Wan Pīsu) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda with an anime adaptation. The series focuses on a ragtag crew of heroic pirates called the Straw Hat Pirates, formed and led by a captain named Monkey D. Luffy. Luffy's greatest ambition is to obtain the world's ultimate treasure, One Piece, and become the Pirate King.
Growth and popularity
The One Piece manga began its serial run in issue #34 of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine on August 4, 1997, while the anime adaptation produced by Toei Animation premiered on Fuji TV on October 20, 1999.
Eiichiro Oda originally planned One Piece to last five years, and he had already planned out the ending, but he found himself enjoying the story too much to end it in that amount of time, and now has no idea how long it will take to reach that point.[1] Nevertheless, the author states (as of July 2007) that the ending is still the one he had decided on from the beginning, and he is committed to seeing it through to the end, no matter how many years it takes.[2]
One Piece is the third highest selling manga in the history of Weekly Shonen Jump,[3] (behind Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Kōen-mae Hashutsujo [Kochi Kame] and Dragon Ball) and is currently their most acclaimed and all-time third-best-selling title in Japan. The manga is so well-liked that it is the first to increase the sales of Weekly Shonen Jump in eleven years.[4] Volume 25 of One Piece holds a manga sales record in Japan, with 2,630,000 units sold in its first printing alone; as of Volume 46, the series has sold over 140,000,000 copies domestically, and is the fastest manga to reach sales of 100,000,000.[2]
Manga
Viz translation
The One Piece manga, written and illustrated Eiichiro Oda, is originally published by Shueisha in Japanese for sale in Japan. In the west, the English adaptation is published and distributed for sale in North America and Australia by VIZ Media in both the form of the American Shonen Jump magazine and graphic novels. The first artbook, Color Walk 1 has also been released in English. The second and third books have yet to be released in North America.
Anime
As the success of One Piece rose within its serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump, it would soon reach an even larger audience through the medium of television, being adapted into an animated series. That television series (a largely faithful adaptation of the manga) debuted in 1999, but animated One Piece actually had its origins one year earlier with an OVA. It was translated into English and brought over the pacific in 2004, when it debuted on 4Kids TV. Since then, it has migrated to Cartoon Network's Toonami block.
Episodes
As of January 20, 2008, One Piece has had a total of 339 TV episodes. Episodes from 207 onwards have been broadcast in high-definition at 720p resolution, in addition to standard definition.
Though most anime series air a new episode every week, the most recent One Piece episodes air at an average of four episodes a month or, in some cases, air as several back-to-back episodes followed by a break of several weeks.
In the fall of 2006, Toei Animation produced a series of five recap episodes, retelling the back stories of each of the Straw Hat crew members using clips from old episodes, tied into the current storyline by framing the recaps as flashbacks each of the characters were having just before storming the Tower of Justice. The recaps also marked a change in the series' time slot.
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