The road to the Pirate King — One Piece and Eiichiro Oda
Eiichiro Oda began serializing ONE PIECE in 1997, when he was 22 years old. The Shōnen Jump of that moment was at a turning point: Dragon Ball had ended in 1995 and SLAM DUNK in 1996. The magazine's circulation, which had reached 6.53 million copies at its peak, was falling sharply, and the following year it ceded to Shōnen Magazine the top sales position it had held for 24 years. Against that backdrop, ONE PIECE won the readers' favor alongside Yu-Gi-Oh!, HUNTER×HUNTER, NARUTO and, somewhat later, BLEACH, launched in 2001, and became the flagship of the magazine's new era. In 2026 the serialization is in its 29th year and exceeds 1,185 chapters. With more than 600 million copies sold (a Guinness World Record), it is already a living legend of manga.
WANTED!, MONSTERS — Eiichiro Oda before One Piece
In 1992, while still a high-school student, Oda made his debut with the one-shot WANTED!, which earned him an honorable mention in the Tezuka Award. After a series of one-shots such as ROMANCE DAWN and MONSTERS, he finally secured a serialization. These short stories contain the searching and the prototypes that preceded the birth of One Piece, and the anthology of early works lets you trace that journey in a single volume.
Collaborations that cross genres — ONE PIECE CARD GAME
One Piece's influence has gone beyond manga to extend into anime, film, video games and merchandising. In recent years it has also unfolded in a new field: that of collectible card games. Since its launch in 2022, ONE PIECE CARD GAME has reaped success on a worldwide scale. The official guides for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Anniversary exhaustively compile the universe of the game.
ONE PIECE Magazine
ONE PIECE Magazine is the series' official mook, gathering character specials, worldbuilding explanations, previously unpublished illustrations and interviews with Eiichiro Oda. Vol. 15 devoted its special feature to FILM RED, with statements from Oda himself about the film and interviews with the eight musical groups in charge of the soundtrack. Vol. 18 delved into Zoro and Sanji, presented as the crew's "two wings," in a monographic issue. Vol. 20 focused on the relationship between Shōnen Jump and One Piece, with a 13-page interview in which Oda recounts how he came to become a mangaka, plus an unpublished manga signed by a former assistant about day-to-day life in the studio. It is a publication conceived to reach what reading the manga alone cannot quite attain: the details of the characters, the inner workings of the worldbuilding, the author's own words. The more you read, the more it changes the way you see the work.
Color Walk and All Faces
In weekly manga series, the norm is for artists to delegate much of the crowds and backgrounds to their assistants. Oda does not: he personally draws everything from each of the figures in the crowds to the details of the backgrounds. The Color Walk series is the official art book that compiles the covers, chapter opening pages and color illustrations Oda has drawn throughout the serialization. It brings together in a single volume, in large format, original illustrations that appeared only once in the magazine or in the collected volumes, allowing you to appreciate Oda's color and composition at a size close to the original. The All Faces series is a three-volume visual book that collects, by means of artificial-intelligence extraction, all the "faces" that appear in volumes 1 to 60 of the manga. In total, more than 100,000 characters; Vol. 1 alone contains 24,908 faces. It is material that lets you contemplate from another angle twenty-five years of work, over which Oda has characterized every last one of the extras, one by one.
Venture deeper into the world of One Piece
The art books in this category are original Japanese editions, published by Shueisha. The Color Walk and All Faces art books, which trace the history of the serialization and Oda's draftsmanship; the ONE PIECE Magazine, which delves into the work from multiple angles; the official card-game guides and the books documenting the transmedia expansion; and the anthology of early works that gathers the trials preceding the serialization. Every title is in Japanese. There is a One Piece you cannot reach by reading the manga alone, and it is here.