22 years before our protagonist begins his adventure the Pirate King Gold Roger is sentenced to death, Roger's last words before his execution leads adventurers to the sea in search of "One Piece", a grand treasure left back by Pirate King Gold Roger that will grant them wealth, fame and power beyond their imaginations. This sparked the Great Era Of Pirates!
As a child, Monkey D. Luffy was inspired to become a pirate by listening to the tales of the great pirate "Red Hair Shanks". But his life changed when Luffy accidentally ate the Gomu Gomu No Mi (Rubber-Rubber Fruit) and gaind the power of the legendary devil fruit making his whole body rubber but at the cost of never being able to swim again! Years later, still vowing to become the Pirate King, Luffy sets out on his adventure to gather a reliable and strong crew and search for the legendary treasure ONE PIECE!
One Piece which started serializing on August 4th 1997 is one of the most famous ongoing series in Japan, selling over a record breaking 37,996,373 copies from November 22, 2010 to November 20, 2011, while the second best series during that time span was Naruto selling 6,874,840 copies. Apart from that One Piece has sold a total of more than 260 million volume copies!
The difference in numbers isn't the only thing that makes One Piece what it is, while it mainly is a Shounen series it is known for it's ideology and creativity. While you see the usual plundering and murderous pirates, you also see pirates that have their own believes and would die following it! You see Marines, the protectors of the innocent and knights of the seas, but is their sense of justice really right?
One Piece brings to you a action packed adventure series with humor that will make you laugh as well as emotions that will make you cry. The message behind the series is deep, making you want to live the life of a great warrior of the sea! It is also known to focus more on the story rather then typical Shonen fighting.
Due to the neglect from the publishing companies that licensed the series for printing in English (for United States and Canada) [Viz Media], the series wasn't brought into the spotlight early on in the west. A major factor was lack of advertising, while lately the success of One Piece is growing all over the world, other series such as Naruto and Bleach were advertised well by the English publishing companies but they failed to do so with One Piece. This caused fans of One Piece to be a minority for a quite some time, Fansubbers and Scanlators played an important role in the growth of the English fan base, providing the English fanbase with English translated anime episodes and manga chapters.
Being the top series currently serialized in Japan, we are sure with proper marketing and advertising it will capture the audience of the west (it already has!) as well, since the series itself is pretty addictive once you start following it!
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- Published:
- Feb 16, 2012
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- 535
