‘One Piece’ Announces New Anime Special

One Piece is celebrating its huge 20th Anniversary, and fans have seen some fruits of that celebration with both a slick sizzle reel looking back on the anime series and a brand new movie coming this Summer. But the celebration isn’t over just yet as One Piece has announced a new anime special will be coming later this year in Japan.

Based on Eiichiro Oda’s one-shot before the release of One Piece, the new anime special will be adapting Romance Dawn and releasing later this October.

Scheduled for a release October 20 in Japan, the new special will be adapting Romance Dawn, the prototype one-shot Oda worked on before it became One Piece. Romance Dawn actually released in three different versions, each tweaking character designs and story, before it became the One Piece we know today. There’s currently no indication which of the versions this new anime special will adapt, but there’s a good chance it will be Version 2.

Version 2 of Romance Dawn (which also is the name of the series’ first chapter) has the same cover as depicted in the announcement video, so there’s a good chance it’s the version we’ll get. Version 1 already got its own anime adaptation years ago as it was released as part of a special OVA made for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump’s 40th Anniversary. Fans will get to see a new side of Luffy’s roots with this one, so they are pretty excited.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.

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