Captain M Entertainment

A lot of interesting things happened this week, so obviously the thing to talk about is cover pages.

Chapter 1161 uniquely has two of them – a colour spread and a cover story. And yes, this is actually unique, though some may think otherwise. We have to distinguish between magazine colour pages and actual parts of the chapter. Maybe you remember chapter 1019 having two colour spreads, but the Where’s Wally collaboration wasn’t part of the chapter and didn’t get included in its volume release. Did chapters 1023 and 1025 have two covers then? Actually, in the volume, all three parts of the WT100 illustration are presented together at the end of the book instead of with the individual chapters they were first published alongside in the pages of Jump. Chapter 1145 was published alongside special illustration for the anime’s return as well as a normal cover page, but hasn’t been placed in a volume yet, so we don’t have the final word on what is actually included in its pagecount, though my guess is that the anime illustration will be at the back of the book. Jumping way back, chapter 217 was published with a colour page that even featured the chapter’s title and number on it, alongside a cover story page, however in the volume, the colour page was moved to the front of the book and the cover story got the number and title like normal.

And a weird outlier case, while we’re on the topic chapter 304 was published with colour pages featuring giant rainbow-coloured eels and two pages of manga showing the Strawhats putting together a band to summon them. These pages are usually considered the cover of that chapter, and yet in the volume, the four-page sequence has its own place in the table of contents labelled ‘Straw Hat Theatre,’ leaving chapter 304 to be one of very few with no official cover at all. It shares this honour with chapters 4 and 6; chapter 817, which is fronted by Oda’s illustrated Film Gold poster in both the magazine and the volume, but the title placement and the volumes table and content confirm that the poster is not part of the chapter; chapter 999, due to the two part colour spread being collected together as part of chapter 1000 in the volume; and 1024 which had the middle segment of the WT100 illustration and was the only one of the three chapters it appeared with not to have its own cover.

But chapter 1161 has no such caveats or special conditions like any of the above. There is no collaboration or special event. It’s just two covers. No reason to think the colour pages will be collected separately. Wild.

Okay, so why and how has this happened? I’ve seen it speculated before that Oda does colour pages in bulk in advance so he can throw one in as often as the magazine needs it. Maybe another author had to miss their colour pages at the last minute so they brought in one of Oda’s reserves. Or it could have been his own choice to handle issues with the structure of the chapter and the layouts of the page. See, because of how the magazine works, the actual black and white portion of the chapter has to start on a left-side page of an open book. Which means you don’t get to follow up the colour spread with a regular spread in normal circumstances. If Oda had the first spread of this chapter planned out, with that wide establishing shot of the island and the other scenes happening around it, knowing the page space for each moment would have to line up to give the Rocks Pirates heavy hitters their own spread in a few pages, he might not have seen a way to make that single first black and white page work in the layout, and just wrote it off with a part of the cover story instead.

The final thought is that maybe the cover story needed to hurry along to coincide with some upcoming event or drop some info before it becomes relevant in the main story, but I don’t really see where that connection would be with things sitting as they are.

All that said, this is the best colour spread we’ve had in a while. What a beautiful and charming work of art. There are so many little stories playing out at once – Chopper stuck in the machine, Brook’s rescue attempt, Franky apparently struggling so hard to save him that he’s running out of coins (you’d think he’d be the best with a mechanical arm), and everyone else trying to collect the plushies of their favourites (but wait, who pulled Buggy?). The chibified toys of all these big names from everyone’s backstories and training arcs are adorable and I want one for every character. It’s perfect.

A side note about shifting colour schemes, we have Gaimon drawn in colour by Oda himself for the first time. What’s different? The frame of the chest is gold instead of steel grey, and his beard is green. Gaimon was actually coloured with a green beard in the digital colour manga, but the anime gave him a brown beard and the Vivre Card databook and WT100 renders altered the digital art to follow the anime. But now it seems the colour manga was right from the start. Or at least until Oda changes his mind/forgets what he established again. I know colour isn’t a priority for the man.

The other cover is a pretty standard Yamato cover story thing. Hyogoro’s wife being memorialised with the fallen retainers is a deep cut, and I’m curious about the obscured Kurozumi lantern. Is it for Kanjuro, or a general memorial for the members of the clan who were unfairly persecuted? It maybe should not be ignored that Yamato has rejoined Kin’emon and Momonosuke for their prayer, truly bringing this story full circle. Ending next week? Please?

Well, that sure was a chapter. What? I’ve only talked about the covers? Alright, let’s keep going. Actually, for most of this chapter, we’re just watching fights that we knew were coming play out, so there’s not a ton of analytical work really to do. It’s all enjoyable, but unless you’re the kind of person who’s deep in the powerscaling discourse, it’s not giving you much you didn’t already know.

I’m glad we get to see more of Dragon’s mission to save the kids. It seem like he was getting away a little too easy last week, and it makes sense someone would have been put on them. I’m sure the misunderstanding on Maffey’s part of it being a single child instead of two makes a lot more sense in the original Japanese, where plurals aren’t as certain in casual speech. That said, I like the official translation’s attempt to play if off in the radio chatter toward the end of the sequence. Clever wording there. Maffey is an excellent character design though, and adds another to our list of known Celestial Dragon family names.

The showcases of all the heavy hitters’ powers here are awesomely drawn and great to see. I wonder why we never saw Big Mom’s Heavenly Fire Blitz at Wano, or was the Maser Cannon meant to be the upgraded version of it?

As the action moves into the middle of the island, I can’t help feeling there’s a missed opportunity in not finding space for a taller panel that really sells the scale of those mountains and the way they create a tight corridor of carnage. Maybe it’s being saved though. We still have to see Roger and Garp teaming up against Rocks.

Sommers is being set up for a truly spectacular downfall in the present. What a bastard. Man, the moment he grabbed Shakky’s leg and raised his club, I thought he was going to break it at the knee, but maybe that would have been too visceral for One Piece, even with Oda in ‘show the horrors’ mode.

Rayleigh making the clutch save and getting the ‘treasure’ puts a bow on the flashback’s Kuja arc, setting him and Shakky up to go into the present. So my question is, what happens next? Roger is ready to go, as he says in the last panel. While the Rocks Pirates might care about that, Rocks himself will want to prioritise his wife and child. So what puts them head to head with each other? What move could Rocks possibly make that would Garp and Roger put their differences aside? Perhaps Rocks witnesses Eris slain and goes on a mad rampage, hurting friend and foe alike? A little cliche, but it could work. Will the God Knights stay involved, or will they prioritise leaving with the Celestial Dragons? And how does this result in the island being literally wiped off the map?

I’m very excited to see what answers we’ve got coming up next week.

The main event is here. This chapter takes the time to revel in the brutality of it and the weight of the crews who have shown up to fight. It turns out light on plot progression, which is something I’d normally be hard on. But with all the hype, lingering here gives the scene appropriate gravitas. All that to say, I’m satisfied, even without much plot-wise to talk about.

I’m curious about how Garling found out Blackbeard was part of the Davy clan. Were hospital records leaked to him, like how Kuma’s lineage was discovered? But then, everyone seems convinced that both mother and child carry the bloodline, when it would probably should be only the kid. Well, however it happened, you can see the kind of impression being left on a poor, young Blackbeard. I wonder if we’ll see any more formative events between this and his begging to be taken in by Whitebeard that helped turn this trauma into dark ambitions. Actually, will he get to witness his father in action before getting saved from the island?

The start of the games brings a truly uncharacteristic amount of carnage and cruelty to the pages of One Piece. It’s a genuinely horrifying and harrowing sequence. We know there are systems of suffering in place, but unless it’s for tragic backstory reasons this kind of wide-scale slaughter would normally be inferred (contrast the genocides of Ohara and Flevance). Sommers’ scene is particularly horrible. I can’t wait to see what punishment is waiting for him in the present. Also hey, Gunko’s wearing a skirt. We can put to rest the theories that she goes pantsless in memory of Brook. A bare-legged look can just be a bare-legged look, even if it is still a weird design choice. Why are they calling her a pet though?

I think brutality is often self-sabotaging. The death of an entire platoon for the actions of one soldier is an iron-fisted way to run an army, and seems like a strong disinsentive for disobedience. But what are the others going to do when one goes rogue, knowing they can’t be saved? They’re going to lie. They need to have as little to do with him as possible and hope he turns up having done no harm, rather than drawing attention to his absence. Maybe Dragon could have been stopped before he attacked a noble or stole a noble’s children if his absence was reported. But no one’s going to learn that a single Marine is loose on the island, witnessing the elites’ top secret human hunting game. And in this way, the World Government creates its greatest enemy.

It’s really interesting putting this chapter side by side with our previous glimpse of God Valley and looking at all the snippets of dialogue between the Roger and Rocks pirates with a whole new context. There are some really telling lines in there that show Oda’s been cooking this one for a while. It’s actually amazing Kuma’s version was so coherent considering how much was left out. Is there anything more hiding between the cracks even of this version? Say, how Dragon got his hands on those kids when they would presumably be safely tucked away at the hunting game’s headquarters, or how he got separated from his platoon in the first place?

So “Knights of God” is coming out as the seemingly official romanisation for the Holy Knights’ name via the raws for this one. I’d like to temper that with the knowledge that word order and the need for that connecting ‘of’ in Japanese can result in weirdness when translated so directly. Remember when Law’s crew were introduced as the ‘Pirates of Heart’ in Zou? That’s because these signs are written for a Japanese-speaking audience using conventions that would make sense for them, not as a direct guide for the English speaking world. In English, Law’s crew can remain the Heart Pirates because the ‘of’ is inferred by the words existing together as a proper noun, and because we put the descriptive word first. Following logically, I would choose God Knights as the name for our ‘Knights of God’ based on the info we have now. The scanlations’ ‘God’s Knights’ lands close at a glance, but misses the mark with the possessive. Firstly, why they made ‘god’ singular when we know there’s a 19 families worth of people who are self-proclaimed gods is beyond me. And secondly, the possessive implies ownership or subordination. But these aren’t knights who are in service to the gods of Marie Geoise, these are gods of Marie Geoise who are also knights. So the God Knights. Viz’s original ‘Holy Knights’ actually leaves itself more open to the correct interpretation despite feeling like a bigger leap in word choice. Their new ‘Holy Knights of God’ is both redundant and a tad awkward, but I assume they’ll be shortening back to what they originally had for most usecases going forward.

Splitting of hairs done, these guys have some really cool designs. I hope more of them show up in the present. But how many will be able to? Garling and Sommers have aged, but Gunko hasn’t. What decides who gets the agelessness treatment to go with the immortality?

It’s never not a bad time for a break week, but this is a particularly bad one. We haven’t seen this many world-shaking players come head to head since Marineford, and even in a flashback with a foregone outcome it’s impossible not to be excited. I’m here as much for the clash as for how Oda could portray it. Remember back at Marineford where we got two chapters in a row where every possible pair of pages was a spread? That would be an awesome trick to repeat.

It’s finally happening and it’s even bigger than we thought. It’s been a One Piece thing going all the way back to the very first volume to emphasise that treasure is in the eye of the beholder: family and personal keepsakes rather than silver and gold. How fitting then, that love, lust and family become the motivations for the conflict on which history pivots rather than money or power (give or take the mysterious thing that Garling found).

There’s tragedy in this as well. It’s hard not to imagine a timeline where Roger and Rocks found common ground in saving Shakky and a common foe in the Government instead of somehow ending up clashing. What if Roger had known Rocks’ family was on the line? He’s the pirate’s pirate at this stage of his life, but I don’t think Oda would play him as totally uncaring of something like that. In fact, the idea that Roger apparently sided with Garp over Rocks almost feels even more unrealistic given the stakes, which makes me wonder if there’s one more complication coming that we don’t know about yet. Imu, through Gunko (who we know is there) springing a trap on Rocks and getting him with the Domi Reversi maybe? But maybe that would be too much if we’re just going to see it done a second time to Harald in a few chapters.

Oda wastes no time after the opening montage of Shakky reactions and man, I was asking questions about Garling’s level of affection to this mysterious red-haired woman last week, but I was not prepared for him to outright murder her so coldly. That’s psychotic even by Celestial Dragon standards, but it goes to show how deep the ‘humans are insects’ mindset runs.

What I wasn’t expecting was a young Dragon to be here as well. We really are getting everyone important involved and setting them on their course to be part of the present day’s status quo. That said, ever since we found out Dragon was a former Marine, it’s been kind of a given he’d have witnessed some atrocity or genocide to set him on his Revolutionary path, and this is as good an example as any, if not better. Plus, it saves or at least shortens a future flashback to tie his origin into an established conflict.

Jumping around more, we even get a young Morgans. Even though he’s in bird form here, without showing his human face, knowing that he was already a journalist this early rules about a lot of theories about him secretly being someone we already knew. The balls on him, to already be blackmailing Cipher Pol though! How has he managed to stay alive 40 years operating like this? But it feels odd to me that the World Economic Journal is called a local paper here. I’d kinda figured it was a more long-running publication than that, one of those newspapers that’s been going since your grandparents’ days. For it to have gone from not existing to be a major propaganda arm and distributor of bounty posters in a single lifetime is pretty crazy. Like, the publication responsible for the Sora comic strip that cemented Germa 66’s villain status is younger than Vinsmoke Judge himself. Honestly, more respect needs to be put on Morgan for what he’s built how much impact he’s had on the world in a generation. Obviously other newspapers existed before this (we see a few of them in the opening pages of this chapter) but I thought the news coos were a Morgans invention, what with the bird powers. So how were these older papers distributed?

Neat seeing a young Big Mom scouting out powers for her children already. Wonder when she decided to commit to making them food themed. Come back in six months for hilarious SBS sketches of dragon, hormone and paw-paw Katakuri.

I felt for Rocks during his conversation with Harald. Such bad luck that his family ended up in the position they’re in. If he’d hidden them one island over. If Garling had stopped one island away on his mission. If Shakky had been the prize for any other game. Only one of those things could have stopped God Valley from being what it was and changed the course of history. But one way or another, they’re all conspiring to put Rocks in an unwinnable situation and bring his ambitions crashing down.

And the Davy clan? Davy D? I’m not quite sure where this goes on my corkboard yet, but it’s definitely important. One more point of data for ‘what does the D stand for’ as well. ‘Davy’ was a fairly popular theory for it, but now that’s out of the running. Or is it? We have a Tony Tony Chopper, why couldn’t we have a Davy Davy Xebec?

The competition doesn’t quite get started in the final pages, but it’s coming together quickly. I think it’s a little curious how Celestial Dragons distinguish between slaves and wives, at least when it comes to women from the lower worlds. But maybe it’s one of those distinctions without a difference. The ‘kept in pristine condition’ comment is obviously all kinds of icky, but I do feel a little relieved for Shakky that even in a year of captivity she was likely spared the Ginny treatment.

And finally, Dragon and the Figarland babies. Ain’t that something. Luffy’s father saves his mentor’s life. No relationship between Dragon and Shanks has ever been hinted at that I can remember, though they’d obviously be aware of each other. Does Shanks know? Whether or not the rescue is onscreen now or later, it fills in a big piece of the puzzle about how the twins ended up separated. I wonder if Dragon looks back and wonders if he could have saved both when he sees the person Shamrock was raised to be.

I feel like next week has chapter of the year potential with everything we’re building up to. Oda’s obviously passionate about this sequence and is firing on all cylinders to get it ready. The art feels consistently high quality compared to the handful of unfinished panels seen in recent weeks, so everything is set to make it pop. I’m hyped. It’s happening.

Okay so we’re definitely doing God Valley, huh? I wonder if it’ll be the full story, or if there’ll be one last POV to go through to find out how baby Shanks ended up in that chest. It’s agonising to have another setup chapter to get the pieces aligned to do that, but given the unfinished art this week, maybe that’s for the best. You want Oda to be firing on all cylinders going into such a vital sequence.

So the grave in the cover story is someone new? Or one of the bunch of lords who were locked up in that cave with a young Yamato maybe? What is this story doing bringing up new elements nearly 40 stages in? I like Ulti’s snow Kaido in the background though.

It’s really cool seeing how the Rocks Pirates actually worked together in the opening spreads. This era and all of these figures have become so mythical it almost felt like we’d never see the human side of them, only ever getting rumours and implications so that our imaginations could fill in the rest. It’s actually a wonder this crew stayed together as long as it did, especially with Rocks seeming mostly unconcerned by the toxic atmosphere he’s created. I said before and I’ll say again that he’s turning out a lot more likable than I could possibly have predicted as an individual. There’s a lot of truth in the man’s politics. But the thing he lacks that the likes of Roger and Luffy as pirates or Dragon as a revolutionary have is the ability to sway others to his beliefs and genuinely befriend them. These people are only with Rocks because power is part of his ambition, and he thinks that’s all he needs. They’re here because he won them in a game, not because he won over their hearts. I wonder if this distinction is going to be what makes him the loser at God Valley.

We also see Rocks’ ‘blasting’ sword attacks in action here. Visually, they remind me of the ‘Sovereignty’ duo attacks we saw Dory and Broggy and Kaido and Big Mom pull off. But here we see a telltale crackle of Haki around the blast to make it really clear what’s powering the move. So interesting that this particular technique only ever seems to come from people associated with or in admiration of giants.

Article 18 of World Law feels like the kind of thing that seems innocuous but gets brought back and explained in full later. But we’ll see.

Rejoining Harald, we get to see World Government cruelty and propaganda in action. Harald shows the naivety typical of a flashback sacrifice in continuing to work with the WG in any capacity after this, even continuing to buy into the idea of the Marines as a force of good. He’s even facing blatant hypocrisy as the World Government begins accepting Elbaph recruits to the Marines while reasoning behind his back that giants are too dangerous to let be citizens. To hear John Giant come up in this capacity is interesting through – I would have thought he and the wider Marine Giant Squad were all the result of Mother Caramel’s trafficking. It’s also weird Oda wouldn’t take this opportunity to show and name them in this flashback. There’s five spots in the Vivre Card Databook numbering around Marineford that’s still not filled and can really only be the guys from that squad, so there must be some kind of plan for them. When could it come up if not now?

And on the topic of characters the series is suddenly remembering exist, hi Kong! Bye Kong!

A few weeks ago I was really questioning the appearance of the Kujas in this flashback, how we could possibly have gone from Harald and rocks to them. The end of this chapter finds an unexpected way to bring it all full circle, seemingly setting up Shaky to be a pivotal figure to God Vally. I could not have seen that coming. It’s pretty crazy she and Rayleigh both live right under the World Government’s nose in the present. One high value target in that zone is a big deal, but two of them? What kind of system must they have for early alerts for Marine raids or Cipher Pol snooping.

The last line is a big of an odd one though. I mean, it makes sense for the World Government to want to test Harald that way, but it’s not a great cliffhanger when all contemporary evidence suggests Rocks fell at God Valley with Harald nowhere nearby. We know it’s not going to happen. I guess then, does Rocks dying before Harald can reach him lead to the more hands-on Holy Knight operation that ends in the massacre at the castle?

It seems then that the next few weeks are going to be big, and they’re going to make this flashback indispensable to the larger story. Hope Oda’s getting the rest he needs to give the big scenes the love they deserve.