Manga Monday: One Piece, Vol 2 by Eiichiro Oda

Hey all, Sam here.

There’s always this sense of exhaustion after coming home from attending a convention. Exhaustion mixed with exhilaration. Sometimes it makes it difficult to swing back into the normal work/life schedule. Thankfully, having dedicated series of posts on this blog means we don’t have to wonder what we’ll post as we try to settle down from the excitement of being at a convention surrounded by other people who are just as passionate about geeky hobbies.

The problem right now is that there is so much that we want to do and play and talk about, and we only have so much time free to play games and to write up blog posts, so it makes life a bit more complicated. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out, but I promise that we have a LOT of content to look forward to, because we played some really fun games over the weekend, and we have plenty more to play and talk about.

But today is not a game post. Today is a manga post, and I’m back to discuss the next volume in my One Piece voyage…David and I are doing a watch-through of the early anime episodes before the live-action show comes around at the end of the month, and I’ve also been reading the corresponding volumes of manga. It’s been a fun experience.

So, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s review post.

As a kid, Monkey D. Luffy vowed to become King of the Pirates and find the legendary treasure called the “One Piece.” The enchanted Gum-Gum Fruit has given Luffy the power to stretch like rubber–and his new crewmate, the infamous pirate hunter Roronoa Zolo, strikes fear into the hearts of other buccaneers! But what chance does one rubber guy stand against Nami, a thief so tough she specializes in robbing pirates…or Captain Buggy, a fiendish pirate lord whose weird, clownish appearance conceals even weirder powers? It’s pirate vs. pirate in the second swashbuckling volume of One Piece!

My Thoughts

Rating: 4 stars

This is another volume that I read back in October 2022, when I had a week that had me reading a lot of books and just finding that spark of joy in my reading again…not that I wasn’t enjoying reading before that, but I had been in a terrible reading slump, and last October was when I started to feel like I might be breaking out of that.

I don’t know if I would have gotten into this series if I had paid attention to it when I was a kid. As much as I loved things like X-Men and Power Rangers and Animorphs (and Sailor Moon on the anime side of things), I don’t think I would have liked the seeming ridiculousness of the Devil Fruit powers back then. Now I appreciate their mind-boggling quirkiness and weirdness. Now they’re just fun, even if they are a bit exaggerated.

This volume gives us more to see with Nami, as well as getting a better sense of both Luffy and Zoro (still referred to as Zolo at times in these early volumes). But we also see Luffy face a new caliber of villain with Buggy, who also has Devil Fruit powers. So it’s Gum-Gum versus Chop-Chop.

Honestly though, the true hero of this volume is Chou Chou. Actually Chou Chou might be the reason why I’m really really starting to enjoy Luffy. We saw this a little in the first volume, where Luffy will step forward and help others, but we really see it here, when Luffy is ready to take on a crew of pirates because they threatened Chou Chou’s treasure, and Luffy knows how valuable a personal treasure is. It’s a very endearing trait.

And even this early on, we’re already to villains and fights that can’t be wrapped up in a single volume, which yeah, it makes sense. If every encounter was over quickly then it wouldn’t be that entertaining of a story, and would actually start to feel a bit repetitive. So, it’ll be cool to see the conclusion of Luffy vs Buggy in the next volume (although since I’ve actually read like 9 volumes by this point, it feels weird to type up my review this way…but I also try and approach these as individual volumes within the whole collective of the series).

I’m not entirely sold on Nami just yet, but I do know that I’m a fan of Luffy and Zoro (especially Zoro). I can’t wait to see Luffy bring more people into his crew.

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All right, well that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back with more geeky content — like tomorrow’s Tabletop Tuesday post, which will be an overall wrap up of our Gen Con experience!