I think it’s a little funny that we finally see Luffy again after seven months then immediately go to a chapter without him. I can live with a little bit of a recap chapter after such a long break. It’s a necessary evil for the casual readers, and at least it comes with some nice art.

The ride on the lift builds a nice amount of suspense before revealing the Sleeptid invasion to Hajrudin’s group in an awesomely chaotic spread. You can almost picture it in motion as a slow zoom out from a close up of Hajrudin’s reaction in the previous panel until his whole group is so tiny in the middle of the carnage. We shift back to exposition after that, but it comes with the new info that one of the kids is Rodo’s brother. Skimming back over old chapters, the one thing we really got from Bjorn before was the hope that he alone be saved at the expense of his classmates. So the kinda skuzzy vibes run in the family. Hey, Bjorn is inked with light hair while Rodo’s is inked dark, but the canonical colour for Rodo’s is purple. Do you think they’ll match in the colour version?

Hey what’s with Goldberg suggesting eating the God Knights? Kind of a Delicious in Dungeon solution to the problem, when you think of it, and even they never went as far as doing humanoids.

The map page is an Oda classic. I really like how the surrounding panels come out of the points of interest like speech bubbles. The ways their tails weave under the main branch gives almost a pop-up effect. It’s this kind of fun visual texture that makes it easy to forgive that this is 90% stuff we already know.

The one surprise is Brook’s absence. Last we saw him, he was made into a bandage mummy by the arrows. Did he hop away, just leaving the others, or actually get free somehow? Or is he actually just lying off to the side and exploring in soul mode?

Jarul’s speech kind of opens with a recap of the flashback we just had. I get that it’s important that Elbaph learn what we already know, but it’s still two more straight pages of old news. Maybe with a bit of fenagling we could have had Jarul reach this moment at the same time Loki started telling his story down below, so that the whole island learns it at once from two different sources, and then cut back to him in time for the big, rallying climax. Oh well. It’s also interesting to have Loki exonerated here instead of at the end of the arc.

The re-introduction of the villains in the middle of the speech is another killer page. They’re all in different spots on the map, and you can see there are three separate panels for those locations, but the actual characters are bursting out of the panel walls, matched in scale to each other so it looks like they’re standing together as a group. Oda brought some real creativity to this week’s spreads and I’m here for it.

A declaration of war is a powerful moment to end on. I’m happy with how this is framed in terms of the peace vs war themes of the arc – Elbaph doesn’t bloodthirstily seek a fight like they might have in the old days, but they don’t just roll over and let themselves be subjugated either. The kids are encouraged to cover their ears and be insulated from the warrior talk because it’s them the peace is for. If you’re fighting, it should be so that your kids don’t have to, not to make them into fighters as well. A well-worded moment that will definitely pay dividends going into the series’ finale as Elbaph fights their war.

And a final stinger for getting back to the action next week: Zoro’s got a plan. With Jarul moments from facing the demons, it could be as simple as ‘throw me’ (a Zoro classic, to be fair), but I like the theory going around that he’s going to reignite Dory and Broggy’s rivalry to slow them down.

While this was probably not the strongest chapter to come out of a break into, we have to consider that it would be much worse if this one had come before a break instead. At least we have the promise of getting straight into the action next week. I wonder how many chapters it’s going to be before Loki and Luffy burst up through the branches and get involved…