4

One Piece 

Author: Eiichiro Oda

Volumes: 104 English & 107 Japanese (Ongoing at at 1101 Chapters)

Publisher: Shonen Jump [click HERE for digital chapters]

There is a genuinely slim chance this will ever be number one prior to knowing how things are going to wrap up. By rights it just wouldn’t feel right putting it any higher when we don’t know if the reveal of the one piece, and beyond that the true ending will be satisfying yet.

Eiichiro Oda has been known to miss the mark sometimes, and while that often simply bumps down a great arc to a good one as a whole, I just can’t in full confidence say he’ll absolutely tie things up in a way I find satisfactory… I mean, just look at how Naruto tied up at the end, I would have put that series much higher if it hadn’t done the weird Kaguya nonsense.

One Piece is a global adventure, and although that means sailing in a straight line (sort of) for 90% of the journey, circumnavigating the planet’s “grand line”, it was always clear that this was going to be a long form story to tell… we just didn’t know we’d still be here 25+ years in.

One piece’s biggest strength is the world, characters, and lore. You can often find, when stories try to do all 3, they’ll often only hit one of those quite as well as One Piece does. If there’s one thing One Piece doesn’t do quite as well as the other members of this list, it’s the post time skip paneling (examples of paneling issues are spoilers, so none will be visible here).

That’s not because Oda is lazy by any stretch though! Quite the contrary, any given page will be packed with detail, but often without acknowledgement for how it appears later in volume print where a two page spread might have so much in it, but be placed in the middle of the book so that details are too often lost to the medium it sits in, sometimes even speech bubbles get caught here, and there’s no excuse for speech bubbles especially when all japanese comic paper and software come with the guides required to avoid text cut offs.

The one thing I don’t buy into for new readers is that it’s “too long” though. As a comic you can still healthily catch up in a third of a year or so which works out as a volume a day, even though there’s no rush to get through it all. You either keep reading because you’re invested, or you stop because you aren’t, “too long” is a poor choice for a descriptor as it heavily implies the journey is unpleasant compared to the destination… a destination that we haven’t reached anyway!