Today I am going to be reviewing one piece. Specifically the manga but I will also be looking at changes made to the cartoon.
One Piece like many Japanese comics has been animated. (These cartoons will now be called anime, as this is what they are) Other examples of this are Dragon Ball Z, Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh. These are examples which have also been translated into English alongside other anime shows; ironically the anime translation normally occurs original manga graphic novels make their way here.
The target demographic of the anime and the books are different, they will overlap but the difference is their. The animated versions being more aimed at children and the graphic novels aimed at ‘older’ people. Because of this things are changed for the TV releases. These changes are also increased due to the fact that what is socially acceptable in Japan is not so in the western world. Pokémon provides two examples of this. The first being a transvestite character and the second the pokémon Jynx is accused of being a racial stereo type. I could talk about freedom of speech here and what is or isn’t appropriate but this isn’t what the review is about.
In Once Piece one of the lead characters is a smoker, for the animated show he chews a lolly pop, all the time, whether a man with a lolly pop permanently in his mouth is any better a role model for a generation of obese children is sadly a topic also not up for debate.
I wanted a comparison picture of smoking and lollypop Sanji(the characters name), however after over an hour of searching the web for videos and stills I have been unable to find one, so this will have to do.
Another change, with the same character involves his choice of colourful language. In Japan their equivalent of ‘shit’ is not a taboo word and often occurs in these TV shows, how ever in the west it is. This has resulted in these references being removed from the TV show. It did however made it was to the graphic novel, but not as shit, it has been translated as crap. This could be down to the choice of the translators but is more the likely to have been made due to the reading age of the book, which is understandable as he says it allot. The one problem being that you’re left with quite a ‘gimped’ character. The whole change is also stupid because it’s nothing that kids have not heard on the playground. However, overprotective yet dolefully ignorant mum would probably disagree with this. I digress, now onto the review.
The first thing I will confront in the review is the pace of the story. This is made slightly complicated by the bureaucracy surrounding the licensing of graphic novels in England, affecting the speed in which the books were published, this coupled with the old anime proverb (or joke) ‘how many Dragon Ball Z characters does it take to change a light bulb? One but it takes him four episodes.’ Put simply manga and anime stories, particularly the fight scenes are overly drawn out, making the stories longer then they have to be. This is annoying when your story is released in monthly (or worse) chunks, and this brings me back to the licensing issues.
About 7 years ago a company called VIZ published allot of manga in North America, this was also sold in England, however the company that licensed to VIZ decided to stop this by stating that their licence did not cover it, so these books ceased to be imported. Then Orion Books (Gollancz Manga) started getting licences for the graphic novels that VIZ used to produce. From this point onward it is all conjunction, I think VIZ may own or have some sort of arrangement with Orion books for them to release their licences in the UK.
So what does this have to do with the flow of the story? Well Orion Books released one graphic novel every 2 months. This means it’s a long time till you get the next bit of the story; this is especially annoying as the books do not ever seem to end at the conclusion of a plot point so you have to wait. If you consider that I’m now on book 11 that almost 2 years and from what I’ve seen of the anime the plot still has a far way to go. Now this is where it starts to confuse me. After the release of book 5 in December something has happened with VIZ comics being imported into the UK, that being its now got the go ahead. Sadly this has the drawback of being more expensive to pay for importing. What’s confusing is that they are now aloud to sell a product that is actually licensed here. Although now that we are getting the North American imports we should get monthly releases, however we are still 6 months behind the Americans, this could have something to do with the licensing but my research hasn’t been able to turn anything up.
Anyway onto the comic it’s self. It was created by Eiichiro Oda and is his first series. It is well drawn. By this I mean the lines are not bleary, you can always tell what happening in each scene (most the time) and most importantly (to me anyway) all the characters look different. This may seem strange but there is nothing worse then reading a manga and not being able to tell the characters apart. This may seem simple enough but keeping mind that there is no colour.
The plot is very good; all the characters have progressed well and link well with then plot. All 5 of the main characters are will used, you don’t get situation where the characters are doing nothing and therefore pretty pointless.
As you know (or may not know) I do not gives scores to my reviews. This because they are subjective, rendering them pretty much pointless. All you really need to know is that as long as you can tolerate the pace of the releases.
BUY THIS SERIES!!!
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