One Piece Volume 1: A Nice and Fun Start

We see at the beginning of One Piece, probably one of my favorite moments. Gold Roger’s declaration, Luffy eating the Gum-Gum fruit, being saved by Ace, and his receiving of the hat. This opening chapter is simple in its content and presents an almost timeless little opener. It never succumbs to reference humor or jokes that feel dated, but rather has a direct correlation to its author. Oda. And his brilliant style of humor combined with his nicely exaggerated, and often, quite iconically, failed at replicating, art style that his characters exaggerated yet distinctively leveled to become like a part of its own universe. It is certainly a hard thing to do, making your world both feel fantastical while giving it limits to where it feels real enough to have existed for hundreds of years. And yet Oda does this in one single chapter.

One of the coolest things that made itself clear to me after re-reading the second chapter after a decade of forgetful memory is how Oda panels everything. Take this panel:

Art is not an easy thing. What am I even saying? Art is like an impossible labyrinth where having personality feels like a chore to your hand and back. Not to say it isn’t rewarding, but most artists can agree that the effort taken is for the care, not the money. Here, Oda has a level of artistic style that only an artist who has taken years of thinking out his plot and improving and capturing an art style like Oda did could.

To show his progression, here is some of Oda’s artwork before One Piece, and see if you can notice any evolution:

It is this strengthening, as you can see here, of, for instance, how tall the characters are and getting a grip on the character designs and the colors of the outfits, as well as how specific the lines on the characters have to be to make each design stand out and appeal to an audience with simplistic yet over the top drawings.

This volume mostly touches on Luffy’s help from a kid named Coby, someone who will show up many times in bits across the manga, his saving and friendship with Zoro, and an introduction to Nami, two future core members of the crew. Overall, it has this slick happiness to it that makes me smile when I read each chapter. While the pirate discussion and character exploration can be quite tame and meandry, even by One Piece standards, it is somehow incredible for that. One Piece, at its best, is just our characters vibing and having fun, and here that is all that mostly happens.

Luffy has this overall goofy energy and attitude that just makes one smile. He is simply fun, done near perfectly. He isn’t ever dumb, a stereotype played into by happy shonen manga protagonists; he is quick-willed and never lets anyone trick him since he is confident in his beliefs and self. He is a static character right now, for sure, but one that works wonders for that. Only a brief, slight progression marks him later, and that is genius for him. His hope and energy never loosen; he simply becomes more aware. Characters aside from Luffy here are mostly decently written, but only later can I really give them the spotlight they deserve. Coby is a scared kid who grows in generic fashion with not much of note to him, and he is mostly the kid who grows from watching the shonen hero do their thing and nothing more for now. Zoro is quite decent and static, as with most One Piece characters, as his development is mostly towards a sad backstory that motivates him to want to break out from that bad situation Coby and Luffy saw him in and then followed by the joining of Luffy and his crew. I said most characters are static, but I mean that in a good way. Most One Piece characters do grow, but mostly they don’t change at all from where we see them. They have stories that developed them, but their motivation is always intact, and, in a way, that is the spirit of One Piece. People on a journey know where they are going in their heads even if they aren’t on the map.

Aaah! That is the pace of this volume: aah. Relaxing and meditative, a good volume to read when you are in the bath and have one hand without water on it to read a whole volume on. One Piece, in its opening volume, is nicely paced, and Oda does a good job of making each chapter feel like its own, to the point where each chapter stands on its own.

Volume one here feels rough and simplistic, but I love it all the more for that.