One Piece 26

Eiichiro Oda – Viz – 2010 – 56+ volumes

YES.  I do like the Skypiea arc (I’ve been spelling it Skypeia, which is how I read it in my head, but… I guess I’m wrong).  There are two things that stick in my memory from it: that the fight with Eneru at the end is epic in a way that Sir Crocodile’s fight was not, and that in order to reach Eneru, they had to travel along the Milky Road, something suspiciously like Snake Way from Dragonball.  A long and winding road that reaches the destination eventually, don’t fall off or you’ll be left behind.  The Snake Way was more a test of endurance for Goku, whereas Milky Road, if I recall, is a fight among several guardians.

The majority of this volume is about the Straw Hats aclimating themselves to the sky lands, working their way into the city, and learning about the politics of the area.  Again, one of the better things about this arc is that getting up to a place in the sky really is an impossible dream, and the characters all marvel appropriately not only at the fact that they made it, but that everyone came out okay, and then they get the biggest kick out of everything from the different firmnesses of clouds to the science of the “dial” system that the sky residents use to record voices and pictures, store energy, and act as motors and the like.  There are whole new systems and rules at work in the sky, and the characters really do a good job of noting again and again how incredibly great it is to be sailing around on a pirate ship in the sky.  It’s something few series do, call attention to the novelty of their world, but again, that’s why I like One Piece a little more than others.

We learn that the citizens of the sky, or at least Conis and her father Pagaya, are terrorized by Kami Eneru and his band of White Berets.  The Straw Hats, unsurprisingly, have been marked for execution for tresspassing into the land of the sky after being mystified by the high tolls at the entrance, and the group is split into two parties.  Robin, Zoro, Nami, and Chopper stay with the ship and get to wander around the Upper Yard forest looking for… anything, and Luffy, Sanji, and Usopp take the Milky Road and have to beat the challenge of the balls and the vassal Satori of the Forest.

Since Eneru is “Kami,” aka God, there are a few attempts at divine humor.  The citizens of the sky all sport wings (though they look more decorative than functional), and Zoro makes some pretty hard, tough-guy comments about how he has nothing to fear since he “doesn’t pray to the kami.”  Chopper is impressed.  The gate into Skypeia is named “Heaven’s Gate,” which made me think of something else.  My confusion was worsened by the commentary from the characters, who claimed that Heaven’s Gate was a bad sign and that “they were all going to die.”  I was alternately horrified and amused that the event was apparently popular enough that it made it to Japan and stuck around for years, until I took the more literal Gate into Heaven meaning.  Whatever.

I rarely mention how much I like the art in the series, but yes, that’s something else that continually amazes me.  Since we’ve got a lot of humor and light stuff going on in this volume before the more serious stuff starts, we see a lot of Tex Avery-like gag takes from the characters, something you don’t often see in manga.  Having grown up with the stuff, it’s almost something I didn’t notice since, yes, that’s what cartoon characters do, but manga characters usually yell rather than… I don’t know, their eyes bugging straight out of their head.  One Piece characters yell, too, but they also get exaggerated expressions that are very American, as opposed to the more usual chibi stuff.

More and more of the story is coming back to me, and if I’m not mistaken, we have a long and surprisingly great tournament ahead of us in the near future.  Even with all the shock and amazement from the characters over the sky lands, the best stuff is still yet to come.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.