#One piece author series
#One piece author tv

I was even ready to skip my parents' funeral if they died while I was on the deadline,” he recalled in an interview five years ago.

“I think I was too passionate about manga in my 20s. The work, partly inspired by his childhood fascination with pirate anime“Vicky the Viking”, was all-consuming for Oda. It was not quite smooth sailing from there though, and it took several flops before“One Piece” was serialised, when Oda was 22.

#One piece author tv

“You could say he is Luffy himself”, one of Oda's closest editors once told a Japanese TV programme.Ī native of southern Japan's Kumamoto region, Oda entered Japan's competitive manga world at 17, when his action-packed maiden work“Wanted!” won a Shonen Jump award. He has turned his house into something of an amusement park, with features like projection mapping, miniature trains and a claw crane. “I know there are many adult readers nowadays, but if I align myself with their taste too much, I feel 'One Piece' would lose its value,” he said.Īnd Oda's childlike impishness makes him well-suited to keeping his younger readership in mind. There are few swoon-worthy romances in the series, as Oda believes his core fan base would not be interested. “Every week I ask myself to assess what I've drawn: 'Would I have enjoyed reading this when I was 15?'” Oda said in 2009.

Loud, gluttonous and lovably simple-minded, Luffy is meant to be an embodiment of how Oda sees his stated target audience: teenage boys. “One Piece” follows straw hat-wearing Luffy and his team as they hunt for the titular treasure coveted by all pirates. It is now on the cusp of its final arc, set to begin in next week's edition of Japan's weekly Shonen Jump magazine. The cultural phenomenon that has sold about 500 million copies worldwide will mark the 25th anniversary of its serialisation.

#One piece author series

It is a modest aspiration for a man whose tale about aspiring“pirate king” Luffy and a motley crew of fellow adventurers earned him a Guinness World Record for“most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author”. “I know I'm now old enough to be more like their uncle. “I want kids who read 'One Piece' to think of me as their neighbourhood brother,” media-shy Oda said in a rare 2017 interview, published in a special magazine to mark the 20th anniversary of the franchise. Luffy, in a pair of short trousers and sandals. He is even reputed to show up at fancy restaurants and hotels dressed exactly like“One Piece” protagonist and pirate Monkey D. The 47-year-old famously refuses to be referred to as“sensei”, an honorific typically used to address seasoned manga creators of his status. TOKYO - He is the creator of one of the world's best-known manga, but“One Piece” author Eiichiro Oda shuns stardom with a carefree attitude that evokes the beloved hero of his work.