can we talk about how beautiful this panel is?
A lot of people shit on One Piece for “having and ugly art style” but almost all panels have such an easy grace and cool composition/perspective that most people don’t even notice it anymore.
Look how this cool this pose is:
There’s a lot of swordfighting in manga, but when was the last time you saw a perspective like this? It’s very unusual, with spottyhat’s hand pretty much in our face, pulled back, but pointing forward.
Just look at these perspecitves!
A beautiful low angle, showing the moment when the guy forward cut the other in the back. It’s 2 moves in 1, one when the forward guy stops and puts his katana away, and two when the other falls to his knees.
But even if he wasn’t, the angle and the composition, hell, their size itself would tell us who’s victorious.
Or this! Guy finds a cursed sword, and decides he likes it, despite the long list of its previous dead owners.
The way the sword looks large from this angle, they are almost the same size! It’s basically in our face, we can see the pattern on the blade. It feels dangerous.
And the way we see the guy looking upwards! It could mean a power imbalance, if not for the grin, since this angle usually makes the subject more “innocent and puppy eyed” (remember the emo trend?) but it’s this way it’s a challage.
Who is the stronger, the man or the sword?
It’s no less than 3 moves in 1 panel, which is insane, but it’s so natural that you dont even notice it.
1) the two marines swinging their swords to cut Luffy,
2) Ace jumping in to push him down, + Luffy crouching down as a result
3) and the sword going through Ace (because he made of fire, but that’s not relevant here.)
Sometimes the panels can feel a bit overcrowded, but they make the conversation’s flow feel more easy and more like as if you were really there in the room with them:
(read everything right to left)
Now look at the version where I put in some extra panel dividers:
It just doesn’t feel the same, does it?
Or, one of my current favourites. Let’s break down this (pre-)fight scene:
It’s sunglasses guy trying to stomp on the spotty pants, mainly because he is an asshole, but it’s mostly the past grudges. Here he is, moving his leg, spotty pants desperate and doesn’t want to die.
The cavalry is here! HOLY HELL!
Stunned silence. Snot guy is shocked. Bird guy and strawhat guy are motionless, lookin at each other standing over the saved man; the tension in the air is tangible between them.
Spotty pants is pretty fucking unhappy that he has failed and had to be saved, but being alive is still better than dead, so.
You felt the tension of the other panel right!
It’s a close-up of that one; they are still motionless and in the same position, but now we see their eyes and faces, confirming what we thought was going on. There was so much raw force in that movement, yet since strawhat’s drawn completely motionless in every picture, instead of him jumping in, the way it’s stopped seem so effortless on his part.
(Also this is where the anime adaptation failed - they showed stawhat guy looking up only now, instead of keeping the scene motionless. It’s a shame.)
Even if I didn’t know a thing about them, I’d sill be hyped for what happens next after this, but one thing is for sure.
An ass is about to be kicked, the question is whose it will be.
It’s pretty fucking awesome, have a look at it in whole:
(Also, this is where one page ends, and you gotta spend those extra seconds to find out wheather he’d live. The rest in one huge page.)
Oda is really brilliant when it comes to doing the panels and layouts. Look at this character introduction, which is arguably one of the best in the whole series.
First, out of nowhere, there is a huge-ass explosion on an island. It’s a pirate’s base that we know but we haven’t heard of him for hundreds of chapters. We don’t know wheather he’s dead or alive.
The next is a narration bubble.
The is never any narration in One Piece.
Then again, it’s a manga about pirates. The weak fail all the time.
We are also shown that the impact came from a man-shaped hole in the ground.
W-what? Who is that? Isn’t it the weak that die? Will he jump?
It’s still the same moment frozen in time, but from a different angle while we are told more about this man.
Who the hell is still alive after all of these, and more importantly, why would he want to throw away the life he miracoulasly managed to keep so far?
Why is no one stopping him?
So he’s jumping down from the island in the sky. That seems definitely too extra for a suicide.
You really feel like you’re too falling while reading a long panel like this.
Also, it’s divided 3 times at the top, breaking the continuity. It’s not a sudden, quick drop; it takes a long time to fall through 10 km of clouds.
We “jump in time” with these, the exact same mechanism as in the group panel, where the divders broke the flow.
And the end is the long panel of the impact, the one we started out with.
Yet all of these panels the same, lagre picture, not seperate ones, so it’s still nice to look at.
It’s also the same moment from two angles, the first from the point of view of others(as all the other ones before), but then, we are suddenly see the world as this mystery (dead) madman who’s just jumped from the sky.
Also, what the fuck is the narrator saying? Has the writer gone mad? How is this possible? The is never any narration, what can possibly be so important that suddenly a “voice from above” is telling us all this?
We see a huge shockwave again, probably coming from the hole, with the other man scattering and voicing the readers’ thoughts aloud.
But we also see what the narrator is saying.
No one can survive that. And yet, we start to wonder…
And fuck!! We’re right. The man who’s just fallen 10kms from the sky is not only pulling himself up from the hole, but has already took out some others.
The original quistion still stands, as in who the fuck this might possibly be??
He knew he woud not die, just hurled himself down from the sky for fun?? And all he got is a headache??
IT’S THE GUY WE’VE BEEN HEARING ABOUT FOR HUNDREADS OF CHAPTERS!!!
AND HE DEFINITELY LIVES UP TO THE HYPE.
Remember, we started at “the weak die” and we progressed to “this guy is trying to die so he must be weak” to “he’s definitely dead” to “this guy can’t even kill himself he’s so strong and he finds it funny”.
What a ride. And all of this, only in a few pages.
Or my other favourite, the end of the Katakuri fight (chapter 896 is basically just one huge fantastic ticking bomb, but that’s a different, brilliant matter), or more precisely these few panels:
Not a word exchanged, yet it show us so much about the quiet, but all-encompassing, deep kindness Luffy has. He’s standing above an unconsicous enemy who spent the better half of the day trying to put an end to Luffy’s attemt to join with his crew again, and what does he do?
He puts a hat to his face, to hide his fanged mouth he’s been trying to hide from the world for decades.
And leaves without a word.
We don’t see his expression, but actions speak louder that that.
Anyway, I just wanted to say how I liked the first Law-Hawkins panel, but you know what? Let’s show some appreciation to the insane skills that made One Piece the brilliant manga that it is today.
Here, have a beautiful Ryuuma:
UPDATE: here’s part 3. and part 2., part 4.)
