The story so far
One Piece follows Monkey D. Luffy, a young man who gains the ability to stretch his body like rubber after eating a mysterious “Devil Fruit,” as he assembles a crew and sails toward the title’s namesake treasure in pursuit of becoming King of the Pirates. It’s a simple enough premise to explain in a sentence, which is part of why it’s stayed legible across more than a thousand chapters and 25-plus years of continuous weekly serialization — Eiichiro Oda has kept adding to the same core cast and world rather than rebooting or replacing it.
From Kumamoto to the best-selling manga in history
Oda, born in Kumamoto Prefecture in 1975, has cited Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball as a formative influence, and worked as an assistant to established manga artists before Weekly Shonen Jump picked up One Piece in 1997. The series has since sold more copies than any other manga in history — a figure regularly updated but consistently cited in the hundreds of millions — and holds a Guinness World Record for the most copies ever published of a comic book series by a single author. Toei Animation’s anime adaptation, airing continuously since 1999, has become one of the longest- running anime series in the medium’s history.
The live-action adaptation that actually worked
For years, live-action adaptations of beloved anime and manga had a reliably poor reputation, both in Japan and internationally, dogged by rushed productions and a mismatch between hand-drawn stylization and live filming. Netflix’s 2023 One Piece series broke that pattern unusually cleanly, earning strong reviews from both longtime fans and new viewers and becoming one of the platform’s most-watched original series in its debut window. Its success functioned as a significant on-ramp for viewers outside Japan who’d never read the manga or watched the anime, feeding a fresh wave of interest into the source material it was based on.
Where to start
Because One Piece is so long-running, most new readers start from Volume 1 rather than jumping in mid-series — the early chapters move quickly and the world-building rewards following it in order. Readers who want a faster way in sometimes start with the Netflix live-action series as a compressed introduction to the East Blue arc before moving to the manga or anime for everything that follows.