Few things have lasted as successfully in the popular imagination as ‘One Piece’. 26 years of almost uninterrupted publication (quite possibly 30), the life’s work of Eiichiro Oda that, surprisingly, began with a story that he told three times over the years, refining characters, style and plot, but in which everything that would follow was already included: ‘Romance dawn’.
The king of pirates
Luffy is already in the first vignette of ‘Romance dawn’, and would last until the end as the key piece of all this gigantic plot. However, in the third story we can also see Nami alongside the Pirate King: in the first two stories she is accompanied by a certain Spiel and Ann. These are small subtle changes: for example, although Oda knew that, at the time of making the long story (five years, according to initial calculations), Shanks would give his straw hat to Luffy, in this first manga who gives it to him is his own grandfather (who in the manga did not appear until much later… And we already know how that ended).
But the most interesting thing to see the evolution of ‘One Piece‘ is to see the original designs in the different artbooks, where you can see that from the beginning it was clear that there would be ten crew members. Some were very clear (Luffy, Zoro, Nami and Sanji) and the rest… let’s say they were polished. For example, Chopper was, in the first group image, a smoking human-reno and Usopp an adult pirate captain.
The rest of the crew has been directly changed, sometimes for the worse. This is the case of Nami, who in her first designs was a thief with a mechanical arm and a gigantic axe. Not very useful to have to draw her every week, of course, but I just want you to imagine her giving giant axes left and right to get a few berris. Oda, you still have time to do it.
Instead of rushing like a man possessed into the unknown, Eiichiro Oda created, tweaked, reworked, replayed, moved and changed to his heart’s content to create his great masterpiece. And now that the end of the adventure is finally in sight, it’s time to remember the beginning. How we’ve changed, Luffy!
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