One Piece Actor Patrick Seitz Weighs In On Series' Batman Takeover

One Piece is popular. The series, which follows the pirate Luffy D. Monkey and his band of swashbucklers, the Straw Hats, has managed to take the world by storm since its inception in the late 90s. While the crew of protagonists have fought their way through multiple enemies, including Kaido and Big Mom, they're setting their sights on their next big opponent: Batman? With One Piece close to outselling Batman in terms of overall book sales, we managed to chat with the English voice actor for Franky to get his thoughts on the titanic take down at Anime Expo.

Patrick Seitz, as mentioned, provides the voice of the recent addition to the Straw Hat Pirates, Franky, the cyborg pirate who has made his home with the crew led by Luffy, sailing across the Grand Line. Seitz has provided his voice to bring characters to life in animated series such as One Piece, JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, Justice League Action, One-Punch Man, and My Hero Academia to name only a few. With so many characters to his name, who better to ask about the One Piece/Batman "feud":

Comicbook: Currently One Piece is dangerously close to outselling Batman in terms of overall comic manga sales of all time. It's almost there. I wanted to ask you do you think that the Straw Hat Crew could take down the dark knight?

Patrick Seitz: Yeah, just numbers wise they're better off. I think even Chopper by himself ... I don't even think you'd need all the Straw Hats to do it, but I think some would be definitely be cheering the others on while they were in the fight. Then, they would tag in. Franky could do it alone. I think Batman would be in a real bad disadvantage. He was okay, but I think he'd get schooled pretty quick.

Batman himself was created by DC Comics, specifically Bob Kane and Bill Finger, appearing first in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. It really says something that One Piece is pulling ahead of him in overall book sales considering old Bruce Wayne had a nearly 60 year head start!

What do you think of the rivalry between the Dark Knight and the Straw Hat Pirates? Which franchise do you prefer? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, or that one issue of Elseworlds where Batman was a pirate!

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.