Eiichiro Oda Reveals Surprising Details About ‘One Piece’s Supernovas

One of the coolest additions to the post-time skip era of One Piece were the 11 Supernovas, the top rookies of the “Worst Generation” of up and coming pirates. But it turns out their creation was completely random.

Series creator Eiichiro Oda dished some new details over the creation of the Supernovas and it will surely throw fans for a loop.

Oda clarifies that “all Supernovas have more highlight scenes than I imagined. I created Supernovas right before the chapter where they got introduced. None of them existed in my plot notebooks before that chapter. I was in a desperate situation, worrying, ‘At this rate, Sabaody arc will not be interesting enough,”

Oda needed interesting characters to spice up his next arc, and sort of just made them up on the spot, “Then, inspiration for 9 Supernovas came to my mind unconsciously.” Oda even regretted creating as many of he did, “I should have reduced the number of Supernovas since there were too many, but after all, I made all of them appear in the manga!!”

And it turns out, Oda didn’t even expect their popularity to last as long as it did, “I’m really surprised they survived till now since I thought about half of them would drop out of [sic] tough New World already.”

But, thankfully, the Supernovas idea worked out for Oda and they’re some of the most intriguing characters for One Piece‘s future, especially since three of them are Luffy, Zoro, and the villainous Blackbeard.

Eiichiro Oda also revealed some upcoming news for One Piece‘s future at Jump Festa 2018. Not only will the manga see Wano sooner rather than later, the next villain of the series is “one of the legends which lurks in the One Piece world. The greatest enemy ever for Straw Hats will hinder their way…Can you believe Marineford Summit War will look ‘cute’ compared to that?”

The new live-action One Piece series also got some new information as it was revealed that the series will portray the Straw Hats’ adventures from the very beginning, and will take place in the East Blue.

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 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 430 million copies sold worldwide.

One Piece is currently in the middle of the “Whole Cake Island” arc and is now streaming on Crunchyroll and FunimationNOW.