One Piece Reveals the Original Plan for Buggy’s Cross Guild

One Piece is currently making its way through the Final Saga of Eiichiro Oda’s original manga series, and it turns out that Buggy the Clown’s Cross Guild could have looked completely different. One Piece surprised fans everywhere when Eiichiro Oda announced that the manga would begin the Final Saga of the long running manga. While the series is still far from coming to an actual end, it’s been made very clear that the series is moving towards that eventual endgame as the new Four Emperors of the Sea have started making their way towards the final One Piece treasure itself. 

One of the more hilarious and biggest surprises heading into One Piece‘s Final Saga, also, was the reveal that Buggy the Clown was named a new Emperor of the Sea alongside Monkey D. Luffy after the events of the Wano Country arc. It was then revealed that Buggy was apparently leading a dangerous and powerful pirate group that was putting bounties out on members of the Marines, the Cross Guild, and it turns out that the look and members in this group could have been much different than the final group. 

One Piece: A New Cross Guild? 

As spotted by @newworldartur on X, an older sketch from Eiichiro Oda revealed that there were initially more or different members meant to join the Cross Guild. The current line up of the Cross Guild includes both Crocodile and Hawkeye Mihawk as they were running from the Marines following the fallout of the Seven Warlords of the Sea system during the Reverie. The two of them are using Buggy as a main target to keep themselves safe, but hilariously he’s gained much more notoriety among the Marines and the rest of the seas as a result. 

The Cross Guild has since expanded to become a much more dangerous group than Buggy had ever expected as due to his influence, and his crew’s undying loyalty for him, the group is only seen as a major target from the Marines themselves. But by the looks of this sketch for the group, this group almost could have had much different key pirates working under Buggy. It’s just hard to tell which characters these could have been before Oda settled on the final make up of the group. 

What’s Next for the Cross Guild? 

But while the Cross Guild could have started out in a much different way, it’s not as if the group can’t get bigger in the future. Buggy and the group are now heading towards the One Piece, and it likely means that they will play a much bigger role in the series as it all heads to whatever this grand finale is going to look like. Luffy and Buggy need to have one final confrontation as fellow Emperors of the Sea, and Buggy’s crew in particular has notable enough faces that the Straw Hats might have to contend with. 

With so many characters still unaffiliated and roaming the seas in One Piece’s future, there are many characters who can choose to join this group at a later date. Characters like Perona (who seems to be in the sketch) would be fit for the Cross Guild, and characters like Crocodile and Mihawk who might only want to use Buggy to further their own plans and purposes for the future. 

If you wanted to check out One Piece yourself to see what’s next, you can find the latest episodes of the anime now streaming with Netflix and Crunchyroll. The newest chapters of Eiichiro Oda’s original manga are available for free with Viz Media’s digital Shonen Jump library or Shueisha’s MangaPlus service.