This Fan Counted All of ‘One Piece’s Famous Booms

When it comes to lengthy manga titles, One Piece is on up the list. It isn’t the longest series by far, but Eiichiro Oda’s swashbuckling franchise is surely the most popular. With more than 80 volumes, there is a lot of One Piece to read, and one fan just went through all of them for the sake of…

Well, he did it for the sake of sound effects.

Over on Youtube, a Japanese user Hikaru splurged on OOne Piece‘s manga volumes to do an experiment (via Kotaku). The guy was interested to learn how many times the effect “boom” or “ドン” is used in the manga. Readers know just off the top of their heads that it must be a lot, but Hikaru needed data.

As the video goes on, fans watch as Hikaru counts well into the thousands with his mission. The fan found out One Piece currently houses 5,678 “booms” over its collected volumes. The first only had 39 effects but that number skyrocketed by the time volume 63 went live. The latter publication has a record-high of 111 “booms” according to Hikaru.

This little experiment is a telling one that gives Oda’s fans some nice trivia. In the past, the artist has talked about his use of the “boom” effect. One Piece Podcast’s archives features an interview with Oda where the creator says he simply draws “a sound effect” that he believes should fit.

“[The idea of the boom sound effect] might have had its inception from the taiko drum sounds you hear in jidaigeki’s deciding scenes,” Oda continued.

With more than 800 chapters, Hikaru’s mission to count all of One Piece‘s “booms” is admirable. To put it in perspective, you would have to count all of Batman‘s “pows” in his Detective Comics run to match what Hikaru did, so you better start counting now.

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.

Are you surprised by this One Piece‘s count? Hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to let me know and talk all things comics, k-pop, and anime!