We know that aside from 100 and 1000, Oda’s never really written around milestones, but you still generally find something that feels like a big step on each hundred chapters. While we have a pretty damn good chapter of One Piece this week, I don’t think there’s anything that really qualifies it as a giant leap forward for the story. Maybe all the classic Warlord cameos are meant to feel like the reward for the big eleven-hundred. Maybe, given that the celebratory colour spread is slated for next issue, the big moment missed by one. Or maybe that’s just because of how Jump’s scheduling panned out and I’m overthinking the whole thing.

There’s an irony in Borsalino, in the opening pages, contrasting the climates of Egghead and Punk Hazard. He thinks Egghead’s so much colder, but give it a few years and Punk Hazard will be half frozen over and Egghead will be fully climate controlled.

There’s a lot of characterisation on show in this first scene. Vegapunk is painfully naive in failing to check for bugs in his lab, and this still won’t teach him not to trust the Government. Borsalino has a laid-back and personable demeanour at a glance, but he’ll do his job if he has to. And Kuma. Poor, well-meaning Kuma, loses all sense of perspective where his daughter is concerned. I don’t think he heard a single word that wasn’t about Bonney, even as Saturn offers him basically the worst terms ever. There’s a comparison to be made in Kuma’s reaction throughout the scene to Hancock asking Luffy to choose between freeing his friends and getting a boat. That same misdirect on what the initial reaction means and the laser focus on the people who need saving at the expense of all else. Except Luffy’s version played out in his favour whereas Kuma… well, we’re in a One Piece flashback, so you do the math.

Saturn’s character is also front and center here. It’s that he’s a bastard, all pragmatic and cruel.

I really enjoyed the montage of treatments, slice of life scenes and construction work to show the passage of time here. There’s some nice fanservice in seeing the (probable) moment the Vegaclones were conceived, and Vegapunk leveraging more underworld connections that would have to go back to his MADS days, this time with Storage King Umit. It’s cool that all the underworld figures from Big Mom’s party keep sticking their heads up to connect corners of the world.

There’s some wonderfully nostalgic fanservice seeing all the classic Warlords and a few others reacting Kuma being commissioned into their number. Curious that Doflamingo, proclaimed “champion of evil” sees another miscreant in Kuma, buying into the hype completely. Having been involved in World Government info tampering personally, and setting records straight with his crew on the fall of Flevance, you’d think he’d at least acknowledge the possibility of spin on Kuma’s story. I wonder if the apparent interest in another outright bad guy in the crew ever lead Doflamingo to reach out to Kuma. It might explain them turning up to the meeting together back when they were both first introduced.

An Ace appearance is always welcome. We knew he was offered a Warlord spot, but I think it’s new info that he toppled one before that. This is a little bit of a lesson in taking spin-off material as fully canon, because like, you’d think that event would warrant at least a mention in Ace’s novel or its manga adaptation. You know if they’d waited a few years and done those today the authors would be asking Oda for an original design for the beaten Warlord and making the encounter into at least a small scene if not the whole story, and its absence makes those volumes feel all the more secondary in retrospect.

Jinbe noting the growing political power of the Warlords is also a touch I like. We’ve known about powerful figures abusing the Warlord system for their own schemes almost as long as we’ve had One Piece, but I get the sense that the first generation legitimately acted as privateers and over time more and more people with things to hide have forced their way in. The group becomes both more dangerous and harder to control.

It is adorable that Kuma uses Bonney’s drawing as his jolly roger. No notes, just a great touch. You can really see how thin his commitment to being a marauder is. Also, is that a bear ear on the side of his ship? Maybe we all figured as far back as Sabaody there would be more layers to Kuma, but I doubt anyone expected him to do something that cute, especially with his imposing first impression.

There is a strange current of speculation online that Kuma has been sent to Windmill Village to deal with Luffy or something similar in the last page. Are we not paying enough attention to see that Kuma is already there when the orders come in. Whatever the Government wants (if the orders matter to the story and aren’t an excuse for him to namedrop his location) it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with our protagonist. But maybe I shouldn’t get too high and mighty – getting orders relating to something on the island he just happens to be stopping at for a resupply or whatever is definitely not too much of a coincidence for Oda, so we’ll see next week what the deal with all of this is.

Next week, no matter what, we’re somewhere in vol 109, and I think we have to start building up to the climax of this flashback. Right now, it feels like there’s something missing for the ending, a factor we don’t know about yet. Kuma losing his will wasn’t a shocking betrayal, it was a deal he walked into willingly. In fact, it feels like we prettymuch know it all – he spends some time as a Warlord, is made fully into a weapon at the time the Pacifistas are first deployed. Maybe he’s able to leverage that final request to defend the Sunny because Bonney had already escaped and the Government was wary of him running off with all that tech and became more pliable to his requests (or Vegapunk liked him enough to go behind his bosses’ backs). Mission complete, he’s made a slave until the Revolutionaries grab him and run, and we’re basically up to the present. It would be anticlimactic to just play all that out in fast forward, so I think Oda’s going to work some kind of a stinger in there. Probably something to tie into how and why he’s awakened to himself and begun rampaging while the Egghead Arc happens.

Looking forward to colour pages after quite a few chapters without, and for a final surprise gut punch to put the cherry on top of one of the series’ darkest and most effective flashbacks.