One Piece Artist Reveals Gorgeous Slice-Of-Life Take on the Straw Hats

This has really been a banner year for the cast of One Piece. With the anime and manga focusing on the red hot story arc that is Wano Country and the fourteenth film in the franchise, Stampede, tearing things up in theaters across the world, some of the past One Piece collaborations may get lost in the shuffle. Such is the case with “Hungry Days”, a collaboration between the pirate anime and Nissin Cup Noodles that saw the Straw Hat Pirates dragged into a world that was much more realistic than the one they usually sail. Now, the crossover has returned thanks to Hungry Days’ artist, Eisakusaku!

Reddit User Hoosier_Jedi shared the recent sketch from the Hungry Days artist, giving us new sketches for some of our favorite Straw Hat Pirates that appeared in the recent crossover/marketing promotion between One Piece and Nissin Cup Noodles that put our favorite pirates into a high school setting:

For those of you unfamiliar with the “Hungry Days” promotion, it followed a re-imagined Zoro as he attempted to become the best kendo swordsman in his school, with numerous appearances from the other Straw Hat Pirates featured that showed each cast member in a brand new light as a high school student. These changes were definitely the most apparent for characters who were never human to begin with, including Chopper who is transformed from his typical reindeer form to that of a small high schooler himself.

While Luffy himself, the leader of the Straw Hats and most prominent protagonist in One Piece, doesn’t make much of an appearance, he is hinted at and makes the briefest of appearances at the end of the commercial. It would certainly be interesting to see if this re-imagining would ever be given an anime of its own, as we’d love to see just what some of the other crazy characters of One Piece would look like if they were re-imagined as high school students. Could you imagine “Hungry Days” versions of Kaido and Big Mom?

What do you think of this newest sketch for the One Piece “Hungry Days” promotion? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of the Grand Line!

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.