'One Piece' Creator Once Genderbent Luffy

One Piece has hundreds of characters to its name, but there are some you just can't forget. Guys like Monkey D. Luffy are stars for a reason, but they aren't always done up the same way. And, in one case, they aren't always drawn the same gender.

During an interview with Katsuya Terada for a new One Piece book, creator Eiichiro Oda confessed he's made a few major boo-boos while drawing Luffy. In fact, according to translator Sandman_AP, Oda once turned Luffy into a woman after a long night with zero sleep.

"Oda can draw better drawings when he is busy, but one day he drew boobs in Luffy's body when he stayed awake all night," the interview reveals.

Of course, fans can imagine the kind of hijinks that would go live if Luffy were genderbent for a spell in the manga. There is little doubt Sanji would hit on his captain before realizing who he was flirting with. Zoro may take a temporary leave of absence from the crew to find his center, but Nami and Robin would take the snafu and run with it.

After all, as the Straw Hat crew's only female members, they would need to help their captain out.

Unfortunately, there are no surviving images of what this gender-swap might have looked like, but there are versions of Female! Luffy on the Internet if you look. Fans have long imagined what the genderbent Straw Hat crew would look like, and MegaHouse went so far as to do a female Luffy statue. The prototype was shown in Japan a few years back as you can see here and joins the company's Female! Trafalgar D. Law figure MegaHouse released previously.

Do you think Oda should do a spin-off featuring a fully genderbent Straw Hat crew? 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 been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It's 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 430 million copies sold.