One Piece, volume 1: “Romance Dawn” (continued)

The third episode opens on Luffy and Koby arriving at the (unnamed?) city where the local navy despot holds court in this Dr. Seuss mushroom trip fortress:

While this citadel is surely very effective at warding off marauding pirates and those rotten butter-side-down zooks alike, the local townsfolk aren't any les jumpy for it. Just saying the name of a politically or militarily relevant figure is liable to send everyone within earshot darting behind the nearest piece of furniture in a blind panic like roaches when you turn the light on. In particular, the name of the local overlord Captain Morgan has the locals hiding under their desks with head in hands. Only slightly less terrifying is the name of Roronoa Zolo, the allegedly demon-possessed bounty hunter who's supposed to currently be imprisoned by Morgan.

Our initial (and main? sort of?) antagonist for this story is neither the bossman nor his prisoner, though. It's this guy:

His name is Helmeppo Morgan, he looks 30, and he acts 3. I'm not sure if the author named him after the hair he gave him, or if he made up the hairdo to fit the name. Apparently, Helmeppo had the legendary heroic bounty hunter Zolo arrested for the crime of stopping Helmeppo's dog from terrorizing the townsfolk when he let it off its leash. Zolo is due to be executed, but Helmeppo has promised to let him off the hook if he can survive for an entire month tied up in the sun without food or water. Zolo is currently on day 9, and fully intends to make it to 31.

Helmeppo might not be the most intimidating villain ever. However, his father - Captain Morgan the actual power-holder who does anything Helmeppo asks him to without thinking about it - looks like this:

I really want to know what the hell the mother looked like, if mixing her with the above somehow resulted in the previous above. Berserk + ??? = ONE.

...

There's an author's note explaining that he designed Helmeppo first and then had to work from there to come up with a design that both a) could be an intimidating baddy and b) looked anything even remotely like him. It took a long time and involved a lot of input from peers, apparently.

...

For his own part, Captain Morgan seems to be sucking his fiefdom dry to raise the funds for giant statues of himself. Why does he want them? Because he's great. Why is he great? Because he's in charge. How did he end up in charge? Because of his greatness. His son gets every stupid, counterproductive thing he wants because he is his son, and him not getting everything all the time would compromise the public perception of Morgan's own greatness. Helmeppo having hobbies like "letting his dog bite people" and "walking around bullying children" do not in and of themselves compromise his greatness, unless he were to fail in these recreational endeavors.

I love that the marines' uniforms are a wife-beater and ballcap that say "marine" on them.​

Captain Morgan firmly believes that his way of life is the purest realization of the navy's sacred ethos. He may or may not be correct about this; like I said, I don't know how much of a unified authority the navy even has at this point, let alone if there's an actual government somewhere far away that it theoretically serves.

Anyway, this is about the level of silliness that One Piece: Romance Dawn is going to stay at from this point onward. It's definitely for the best.

For his own part, Zolo the maybe-demonic bounty hunter seems like an okay guy. Scary, but okay.

Easy enough to side with him over the Morgan Dynasty. Unfortunately, when he sneaks into the base's courtyard to check it out, Luffy makes the mistake of telling Zolo that he's an aspiring pirate. Zolo's hatred of pirates is sufficient that he's not even willing to be rescued by one, and makes it clear that he'll have to come after Luffy and all others like him the minute that he's free. Still, Luffy decides that if he gets Zolo's swords for him out of the base's lockup and then offers him his freedom AND his prized possessions, he'll probably be able to change his mind. Despite Zolo's insistence to the contrary.

While Luffy is using his Mr. Fantastic powers to sneak further into the base, Koby is having a crisis of conscience. This isn't the navy he spent his childhood being told about. It couldn't possibly be. The navy protects people from pirates, but these people are even worse than the pirates Koby was enslaved by. This must be a rogue cell. A deserter legion. Something like that. It must be. Things come to a head when Luffy ends up accidentally knocking over the giant statue that Morgan was just having his men raise, smashing it and provoking a doggedly lethal response.

In the end, Luffy manages to get the swords, and when Captain Morgan (whose oversized axe-arm might be sharp and strong enough to actually hurt Luffy) cuts him off in the courtyard Koby makes his decision and unties Zolo.

Apparently, Zolo is a master of the "three blade" style.

Pretty sure they were only able to arrest him in the first place because he chose not to resist.​

Not what I thought he was going to do, going by the wording, but the alternative would have been hard to get away with in a shonen manga. Anyway, Zolo is deadly enough with his mouth-fencing that he's able to wipe out Morgan and his goons with only minimal help from Luffy. Once Morgan is dead, his men quickly lose interest in continuing to fight. Zolo decides he'll join Luffy after all, since he owes him his life and he seems to be a lot better than "pirates" typically are. Koby, for his part, is able to latch onto the delusion that the navy is a good organization, and this particular base just had bad leadership. He'll be parting ways with Luffy here, and hopefully they won't have to fight each other in person in the future. Luffy even uses a (surprisingly, coming from him) clever trick to get Koby to convincingly denounce him, so that his association with an aspiring pirate king doesn't damage his navy career.

Koby enlists. And, uh, well, Captain Morgan was an outlier, but as I suspected he isn't that much of an outlier.

The volume finishes off with two more little stories. One of them being a flashback to bounty-hunter Zolo's childhood, the other being the beginning of the next arc that I assume continues into volume 2.

The former ends up being bit more serious in tone than the surrounding material. And also refreshingly progressive for a shonen manga of this vintage. As a boy, Zolo was the second-best student in his dojo. His pride was stung by the fact that the only student who could outfight him was a girl. And also that she was kind of an overbearing bully, but mostly it was because she was a girl.

Eventually, the two of them had a verbal confrontation in private that turned into a heart-to-heart. It turned out that the reason she was so overbearing was because she knew that they'd all be going through puberty soon, and that she would most likely become smaller and weaker than most (if not all) of her peers. No matter how skilled she is, biology might just tip the scales against her, and if it does there's nothing she can do about it.

Zolo realized how myopic he'd been, and the two apologized for how they'd acted toward each other. They made a solemn vow, on that day, that at least one of them would become the world's greatest swordsperson someday.

The girl died in an accident less than a year later. Since then, Zolo has taken it upon himself to be the world's sword champion in her name. If she wasn't given the chance, then he HAS to make sure he does it. He's a grown man now, seemingly at least in his mid twenties, and he hasn't given up the goal.

...

So, all three of the main characters introduced thus far are motivated by the desire to be the best at something. Luffy wants to be the best pirate captain, largely due to his hero worship of the one pirate captain he knew as a child (and, implicitly, how that interplayed with the preexisting legend of Gold Rogers and the One Piece that every kid seems to grow up hearing about). Zolo wants to be the best swordsman, as he owes it to a childhood friend who had everything stacked against her and then died before she had a chance to maybe persevere despite that. Koby wants to be the best pirate-slayer ever, on account of his experiences under Alvida (though that conviction of his may or may not survive his next little while within the navy).

Nothing out of the ordinary for shonen - heck, a good two-thirds of shonen protagonists have "I wanna be the guy" as their primary motive - but here it's being done in clear parallel and using these characters to mirror each other in a potentially interesting way.

Like I mentioned before, this is also a way, way more sensitive handling of gender politics than I'd expect from a nineties shonen comedy piece. I remember hearing somewhere that One Piece also gets some decent-ish trans representation later on. With this early data point in mind, that certainly fits.

...

The final chapter of the volume starts with Luffy and new party member Zolo having a new mishap at sea. Turns out that Kobi was the only one of the three who actually knows how to sail, and they left him behind. Luffy and Zolo both assumed the other one knew what they were doing lol. A strong current and a random encounter with a dire seagull sees the two of them separated. They then, individually, stumble their ways into an ongoing conflict between the clown-themed pirate crew of Captain Buggy, and a cunning young sneak-thief named Nami who is after their loot.

Nami's name is a familiar one to me. Specifically, I have probably stumbled into more porn of her than any other character from any other anime or manga series. Before I knew anything else about One Piece, I knew that the entire internet wanted to bang Nami.

Either Luffy is tiny for his age, or those pirates are 9 feet tall. Maybe I was wrong about Koby being younger, and protagonists in this comic are just tiny for some reason?

So far she just seems pretty archetypical to me, but she's only just been introduced, so. Anyway, Nami also demonstrates some keen helmsmanship in her one-woman operation against Buggy the Clown, so odds are she's going to end up being recruited as Luffy's navigator by the end of the arc. This volume doesn't get far enough into it for me to say much more on the subject, but so far it's at least as entertaining as the caper with Captain Morgan's group that preceded it.

...

There are other touches throughout the comic that endeared me to it. For instance, between some of the chapters there are little omakes containing illustrated trivia about real life pirate history, notes on character and setting design for the comic, and - most amusingly of all - a series of little instructional bits about how to draw the Jolly Roger and invent your own variations of it.

Aside from being cute, the way these bonus bits are written definitely give me the impression that One Piece is aimed younger than some other shonen manga. "Shonen" is a target demographic that includes boys from around age 11 to around age 18, and One Piece seems to mostly have the 11 year old and directly adjacent subgroups in mind.

I wonder if maybe that was part of the problem with the first two episodes. The author wasn't yet sure if he wanted to appeal more to kids, or to teenagers. Since then, the comic has been more uniformly silly, embraced the superdeformed art style more thoroughly, and featured violence that's either bloodless slapstick or over very quickly (nothing even remotely close to the cigarette eye-burning from chapter one has happened since then, even when the opportunities for it were clear). I don't know if One Piece remains aimed more at younger shonen readers for the rest of its very long run. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But for the latter two thirds of "Romance Dawn," the work benefits a lot from knowing what it wants to do.


Anyway, that's One Piece: Volume One. Very weak start, but a promising trajectory. As I said in the previous post, there's a certain point after this when most fans agree that it really starts getting good, and from the trend I've seen within this volume I'm inclined to believe them.

I also wonder how the art changes later in the run. While the superdeformity is intentional, some details make me think that the mankaga also just wasn't very good at drawing yet regardless of stylistic choices. I've seen some shots from the anime, presumably adapted from the later volumes, and it definitely looked a lot more polished, but I'd be interested to see how the manga drawings themselves improved over time as I assume they did.

Short summary: cute comic, seems fun.