DID YOU KNOW?

Did you know that One Piece is the best-selling manga of all time? In 2015, it set the Guinness World Record for “most copies published for the same manga series.” The manga has sold over 430 million copies worldwide as of 2017. Additionally, the creator, Eiichiro Oda, has also been certified by Guinness for having the “most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author.” 

Oda reportedly works on the manga for most of the day, getting only 3 hours of sleep daily. He regularly wakes up at 5 o’clock in the morning and goes to bed at 2 a.m., with only short breaks in between for eating. In order to publish a chapter a week for the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, the world’s most successful “mangaka,” spends Mondays to Wednesdays doing the layout and dialogue, Thursdays to Saturdays drawing and inking, and Sundays coloring. With 88 volumes spanning 900 chapters, Eiichiro Oda has spent half of his life drawing the manga. However, while One Piece might wear the crown for being the best-selling manga in history, it is leagues behind other manga in terms of volume count and in running time. Dokaben, a baseball manga by Shinji Mizushima which was first released in 1972, has 201 volumes and counting.

You might also be interested to watch One Piece, the animated version of this manga!