The first volume of the Japanese version of One Piece
Eiichiro Oda was inspired da Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump at a young age. As a child he was inspired da Vikings and he aspired to become a manga artist. Later, he created Pandaman for Yudetamago's Kinnikuman. In 1992, Oda at the age of 17, inviato the manga called Wanted!. This got him notice to unisciti the staff at the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, where he became an assistant under several established manga writers including Shinobu Kaitani, Masaya Tokuhiro and finally Nobuhiro Watsuki.
Oda had interest in making a pirate manga both from his obsession with vikings as a young man and inspired da various pirate events including the discovery of the pirate ship of Edward Teach (known da his pirate name of Blackbeard). He wrote two separate one-shots in the mid-1990s, both of which were called "Romance Dawn". The stories introduced Monkey D. Luffy, a straw-hat wearing boy who set out to sea to become a legendary pirate. Several concepts of the eventual serialization appeared in these stories, including Luffy's inspiration for being a pirate and a mysterious power he gained from eating a special frutta that turned his body into rubber (a prototype for the Devil Fruit).
In August 1997, Oda took many of his "Romance Dawn" ideas and started using them in a weekly serial under the titolo "One Piece". It was first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, the weekly shonen magazine owned da Shueisha. The series quickly caught on and became popolare from the initial chapters on, establishing itself as one of the premiere manga series in the magazine.
Originally, Oda wanted his series to run for 5 years (meaning One Piece could have ended in 2002), but he went longer than expected and has no idea how many più years his story will be. However, it should be noted that Oda has stated that the end of Chapter 597 marks the end of the first half of One Piece. Oda has already planned the ending for One Piece. Despite how long it will take him to complete it, he will end One Piece the way he planned from the start.
One Piece is the story of a boy named Monkey D. Luffy who was inspired da Shanks, a pirate. At the start of the series, 22 years before Luffy leaves his hometown and sets sail, a pirate named Gol D. Roger, known as the Pirate King was executed, but before his death, he told the crowd of his treasure, "One Piece". His death sparked what would become the Golden Age of Pirates as countless pirates set out to look for his treasure. Luffy becomes one as well, desiring to be the successivo Pirate King and sets out to gather crewmates and begin his adventures on journeys.
At the time of its release, the dot-eyed style of artwork seen in Anime like Dragon Ball was becoming less popolare and manga and Anime seemed to be moving over for the più popolare big-eyes style of drawing, made famous da shows like Sailor Moon. Eiichiro Oda was fully aware of the change of art style and was worried early on in its run that his style would put off people from Leggere his manga. As time progressed and One Piece's popularity grew, Oda was able to relax the style more, resulting in One Piece's drawing style becoming much più loose and kinetic.
As well as its unusual art style, the style of weird drawn characters had been another worry of Oda. Another problem at the time of early production was that the Bishie was becoming a popolare form of manga character depiction and "ugly" o "weird" characters manga were becoming signifcantly harder to sell. However, these character designs have since become one of One Piece's selling points, allowing più eccentric characters to be drawn.
(I can't reveal anymore, because it would be heavily spoiled if te haven't gotten that far)
The flag of the Straw Hat Pirates
