What's One Piece?

One Piece (stylized in all caps) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda. It has been serialized in Shueisha's shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump since July 1997, with its individual chapters compiled into 106 tankōbon volumes as of July 2023. The story follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, where he explores the Grand Line in search of the mythical treasure known as the "One Piece" in order to become the next King of the Pirates.

One Piece has received praise for its storytelling, world-building, art, characterization, and humor. It has received many awards and is ranked by critics, reviewers, and readers as one of the best manga of all time. By August 2022, it had over 516.6 million copies in circulation in 61 countries and regions worldwide, making it the best-selling manga series in history, and the best-selling comic series printed in book volume. Several volumes of the manga have broken publishing records, including the highest initial print run of any book in Japan. In 2015 and 2022, One Piece set the Guinness World Record for "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author". It was the best-selling manga for eleven consecutive years from 2008 to 2018, and is the only manga that had an initial print of volumes of above 3 million continuously for more than 10 years, as well as the only that had achieved more than 1 million copies sold in all of its over 100 published tankōbon volumes. One Piece is the only manga whose volumes have ranked first every year in Oricon's weekly comic chart existence since 2008.

Setting

The world of One Piece is populated by humans and other races such as dwarves (more akin to faeries in size), giants, merfolk, fish-men, long-limbed tribes, long-necked people known as the Snakeneck Tribe, and animal people (known as "Minks"). The world is governed by an intercontinental organization known as the World Government, consisting of dozens of member countries. The Navy is the sea military branch of the World Government that protects the known seas from pirates and other criminals. There is also Cipher Pol which is a group of agencies within the World Government that are their secret police. While pirates are major opponents against the Government, the ones who really challenge their rule are the Revolutionary Army who seeks to overthrow them. The central tension of the series pits the World Government and their forces against pirates. The series regularly emphasizes moral ambiguity over the label "pirate", which includes cruel villains, but also any individuals that do not submit to the World Government's authoritarian—and often morally ambiguous—rule. The One Piece world also has supernormal characteristics like Devil Fruits, which are mysterious fruits that grant whoever eats them transformative powers. Another supernatural power is Haki, which grants its users enhanced willpower, observation, and fighting abilities, and it is one of the only effective methods of inflicting bodily harm on certain Devil Fruit users.

The world itself consists of two vast oceans divided by a massive mountain range called the Red Line. Within the oceans is a second global phenomenon known as the Grand Line, which is a sea that runs perpendicular to the Red Line and is bounded by the Calm Belt, strips of calm ocean infested with huge ship-eating monsters known as Sea Kings. These geographical barriers divide the world into four seas: North Blue, East Blue, West Blue, and South Blue Passage between the four seas, and the Grand Line, is therefore difficult. Unique and mystical features enable transport between the seas, such as the use of Sea Prism Stone employed by government ships to mask their presence as they traverse the Calm Belt, or the Reverse Mountain where water from the four seas flows uphill before merging into a rapidly flowing and dangerous canal that enters the Grand Line. The Grand Line itself is split into two separate halves with the Red Line between being Paradiseand the New World.