The franchise of One Piece has been around for twenty years, but is showing absolutely no signs of slowing down any time soon in terms of popularity. With the Wano Country Arc tearing up the charts in both the anime and manga, and the fourteenth feature length film, Stampede, breaking records in theaters, the creator of the franchise, Eiichiro Oda, is sitting pretty. It’s clear though that despite the longevity of the series, Oda is still in love with the series that made him so successful and has recently shared some sketches of what some of One Piece’s biggest side characters would look like as children!
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Reddit User Abi_Ram shared the numerous sketches from the man himself, Eiichiro Oda, that depict numerous characters as their much younger selves including the likes of Monkey D Garp, Trafalgar Law, Hawkins, and many other cast members of the One Piece franchise:
One Piece has traveled back into the past numerous times, giving us look at younger versions of numerous members of the Straw Hat Pirates’ crew. Monkey D. Luffy specifically has had his childhood explored numerous times, most recently in the television special of One Piece: Romance Dawn, that gave us a brand new look into the future Pirate King’s past.
While not necessarily showing them as children, the Wano Country arc focused on an important flashback in the form of Luffy’s brother, Ace, arriving at the country years ago, prior to his death, and making a promise that he would one day free the people of the isolated nation. As we know, Ace never managed to fulfill his promise, but the arrival of the Straw Hat Pirates to the country has spawned a similar promise from Luffy, who is looking to free the citizens from the tyrannical grasp of Kaido and his Beast Pirates.
What’s your favorite younger One Piece character featured in these sketches from Eiichiro Oda? Which of these characters would you like to see be given their own episode of the anime? 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 Straw Hat Pirates!
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.
