The first volume of the Japanese version of One Piece
Eiichiro Oda was inspired por Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump at a young age. As a child he was inspired por Vikings and he aspired to become a mangá artist. Later, he created Pandaman for Yudetamago's Kinnikuman. In 1992, Oda at the age of 17, enviado the mangá called Wanted!. This got him notice to cadastrar-se the staff at the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, where he became an assistant under several established mangá writers including Shinobu Kaitani, Masaya Tokuhiro and finally Nobuhiro Watsuki.
Oda had interest in making a pirate mangá both from his obsession with vikings as a young man and inspired por various pirate events including the discovery of the pirate ship of Edward Teach (known por his pirate name of Blackbeard). He wrote two separate one-shots in the mid-1990s, both of which were called "Romance Dawn". The stories introduced Monkey D. Luffy, a straw-hat wearing boy who set out to sea to become a legendary pirate. Several concepts of the eventual serialization appeared in these stories, including Luffy's inspiration for being a pirate and a mysterious power he gained from eating a special frutas that turned his body into rubber (a prototype for the Devil Fruit).
In August 1997, Oda took many of his "Romance Dawn" ideas and started using them in a weekly serial under the título "One Piece". It was first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, the weekly shonen magazine owned por Shueisha. The series quickly caught on and became popular from the initial chapters on, establishing itself as one of the premiere mangá series in the magazine.
Originally, Oda wanted his series to run for 5 years (meaning One Piece could have ended in 2002), but he went longer than expected and has no idea how many mais years his story will be. However, it should be noted that Oda has stated that the end of Chapter 597 marks the end of the first half of One Piece. Oda has already planned the ending for One Piece. Despite how long it will take him to complete it, he will end One Piece the way he planned from the start.
One Piece is the story of a boy named Monkey D. Luffy who was inspired por Shanks, a pirate. At the start of the series, 22 years before Luffy leaves his hometown and sets sail, a pirate named Gol D. Roger, known as the Pirate King was executed, but before his death, he told the crowd of his treasure, "One Piece". His death sparked what would become the Golden Age of Pirates as countless pirates set out to look for his treasure. Luffy becomes one as well, desiring to be the seguinte Pirate King and sets out to gather crewmates and begin his adventures on journeys.
At the time of its release, the dot-eyed style of artwork seen in animê like Dragon Ball was becoming less popular and mangá and animê seemed to be moving over for the mais popular big-eyes style of drawing, made famous por shows like Sailor Moon. Eiichiro Oda was fully aware of the change of art style and was worried early on in its run that his style would put off people from leitura his manga. As time progressed and One Piece's popularity grew, Oda was able to relax the style more, resulting in One Piece's drawing style becoming much mais loose and kinetic.
As well as its unusual art style, the style of weird drawn characters had been another worry of Oda. Another problem at the time of early production was that the Bishie was becoming a popular form of mangá character depiction and "ugly" or "weird" characters mangá were becoming signifcantly harder to sell. However, these character designs have since become one of One Piece's selling points, allowing mais eccentric characters to be drawn.
(I can't reveal anymore, because it would be heavily spoiled if you haven't gotten that far)
The flag of the Straw Hat Pirates
