As always, Eiichiro Oda opens One Piece’s seventeenth volume with a brief personal anecdote, one of the many ways this manga creates a personal relationship between reader and storyteller. Oda mentions how he and his assistants often visit a raucous family restaurant, full of loud children and their parents. However, if you visit on Sunday at 7:30, the restaurant is quiet. All children are turned to the television, all eyes on Oda’s One Piece. Oda understands the responsibility inherent in that – that he has an opportunity to teach and inspire, and that few possess the platform he does for reaching young people. There are few jobs more noble or significant than inspiring the next generation’s dreams, and Oda’s understanding of that responsibility is clear in his every page.
The end of the Drum Kingdom arc is all about dreaming big, as Chopper squares off against Wapourif’s guards and the king himself faces the Straw Hats. But in spite of this volume being relatively stuffed with fights, its chapters end up ultimately reflecting how One Piece isn’t really a battle-focused manga, or at least, the battles aren’t the point of its arcs. The crux of Drum Kingdom is Chopper learning to have faith in himself, and to believe he is both valid and deserving of happiness. Once Chopper has demonstrated that vital self-love, the rest is basically just beautiful fireworks.
One Piece’s prioritization of emotional revelation over beat-to-beat tactical battle drama results in a number of handy dramatic consequences. For one thing, it means that instead of demanding total seriousness and burying themselves in tactical setup, this volume’s fights are able to be breezy and often hilarious affairs. One Piece understands exactly where it can poke holes in its own melodrama – it understands that as long as the emotional and thematic points underlying these stories are solid and consistently respected, it doesn’t have to embrace a self-serious affectation in order to prove how serious it is. Lots of stories believe that seriousness of drama and seriousness of tone are one and the same, but One Piece demonstrates that the key isn’t the affectation of seriousness, it’s the fundamental substance of your conflicts. Even though this is a story about a transforming reindeer who wants to be a doctor, the integrity of Chopper’s feelings is respected at all times, and thus One Piece can maintain significant emotional weight while engaging in all sorts of farcical madness.
Speaking of farcical madness, this volume is friggin’ hilarious, and offers copious demonstrations of how smartly One Piece delivers on its comedy. Luffy himself is probably One Piece’s single greatest comedic resource, simply because he’s always so accepting of the madness around him. If Luffy made snarky riffs on the ridiculous events surrounding him, he’d be insufferable; but instead, his cavalier acceptance of the absurd world around him makes him a sort of buffoonish straight man, where the joke is that he’s not fazed by any of this. Through this contrast of external absurdity and Luffy’s deadpan reactions, the show is able to craft natural jokes that encourage the audience in turn to go with the flow and embrace it all like Luffy does.
It also helps greatly that Oda has a strong instinct for understated visual comedy. You wouldn’t think “understated” would be the appropriate term for a manga as full of slapstick and wildly exaggerated reactions as this, but between Luffy’s tension-deflating responses and Oda’s terrific paneling, many of the jokes here excel through their subtlety of execution. Wapourif’s extremely silly design is repeatedly abused throughout this volume for wonderfully anticlimactic gags, from straight-up deadpan reactions to sequences that embrace the silliness of one isolated physical action.
This volume’s fights aren’t just funny, though – they’re genuinely joyful, enthusiastic celebrations of One Piece’s love of drama and adventure. Luffy once again shows his strength as a protagonist here, peppering Chopper’s big fight with enthusiastic commentary the whole way through. As with his deadpan acceptance of the madness around him, Luffy’s genuine enthusiasm for absurdities like a “seven stage transforming reindeer” is both a natural joke and an earnest, infectious expression of happiness. One Piece never mocks enthusiasm – it sees enthusiasm as the seed of greatness, and celebrates both its characters’ love of adventure and their concern for each other. There is a spirit of joy in this manga at all times, and when a story is having this much fun, it’s hard not to be carried along.
In narrative terms, most of this volume is taken up by a breathless boss rush, as Chopper handles Wapourif’s men while Luffy fights the man himself. As I said, the fact that this arc’s conflicts are more hinged on characters like Chopper and Dalton’s emotional development than any tangible, physical obstacle means these battles aren’t the most dramatically weighty, but they still demonstrate a fine understanding of battle-as-storytelling. The unique combat style and bizarre silhouette of Chopper’s opponent lends itself to some gorgeous highlight panels, while Chopper’s own “rumble ball” power is smartly designed to both introduce tactical constraints (“he only has three minutes to win!”) and also serve as a natural expose of his very weird powers.
Meanwhile, Luffy’s fights get the true visual glory, as Oda’s consistent experimentations with panels conveying movement into depth bear their most beautiful fruit yet. Just look at this gorgeous panel depicting the windup to Luffy’s final blow. That panel is about as classically One Piece as it gets – centered on an absurd and uniquely One Piece concept, awash in gorgeous background detail, and even conveying through its composition the idea that Luffy is drawing all the strength of the oppressed village into this one strike at the king’s palace. Panels and spreads throughout this volume demonstrate Oda’s increasingly prominent use of dramatic blacks and silhouettes, his astonishing capacity for both scale and detail, and his ability to convey movement visually across panels. Oda started this journey as a talented and very unique artist, but he’s at this point turning into some kind of manga-making monster.
Oda knows it, too. The best moments in this volume are both its most glorious visually and its most transcendent emotionally, celebrations of the dramatic core that let everything else descend into such lighthearted madness. Luffy holding a burnt-out flag, standing astride a dying empire, expressing through his own strength that the spirit of a pirate can never be broken. Chopper galloping off with his new family, fleeing one more town as their silhouette makes a flag of the sky, their hearts as one as they revel in freedom. One Piece screams “embrace adventure! Embrace people! Embrace the world!” in every voice it possesses, its starry-eyed perspective clear in both its transcendent heights and its offhand “let’s be pirates together!” That invitation isn’t just for Chopper – it’s for all of the kids in that noisy restaurant, learning there’s no greater power than an adventurous heart.
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