‘One Piece’ Finally Brings Back Blackbeard

One Piece walked out a new chapter this week, and the update was way bigger than expected. The manga didn’t hold back any of its huge story stoppers, and one of them had readers double taking hard.

After all, Marshall D. Teach decided to show up, and the Yonko did so with some major news.

Thanks to chapter 925, fans of One Piece were able to meet up with the fearsome Blackbeard this week. The manga saw the hulking villain pop up in the New World, and all is well with the tyrant. His crew is stronger than ever before, and Blackbeard is in the position to make Gekko Moriah’s life rather difficult.

The former warlord makes a play against Blackbeard in this chapter, and it’s all to locate his man Absalom who went missing on Pirate Island recently. Gekko gets his zombies to help him find Absalom, but it turns out the pirate was too late. As it turns out, the Blackbeard crew has already killed the fan-favorite for his Devil Fruits gift, and Gekko is left horrified by the revelation.

Distraught, Gekko demands to see Blackbeard, but the older man is too lazy to appear in person. Instead, fans meet the villain as he calls out to Gekko via a loudspeaker. It is there Blackbeard asks Gekko to join his crew since the Thiller Bark captain is strong. And, should the man refuse the offer, he might be treated much the same as poor Absalom.

For fans, this update proves Blackbeard has only grown stronger since he was seen last, and that means he’s grown more vicious. The last time fans saw the monstrous villain, he was scoffing at the idea of Monkey D. Luffy becoming an Emperor after the hero’s business at Totto Land were made public. Now, Blackbeard seems to be hunting those with Devil Fruit abilities in earnest, and readers cannot help but wonder if the baddie is preparing for a war they’ve not heard about.

Are you surprised at how far Blackbeard has come since he was last seen? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to talk all things comics and anime!

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.