‘One Piece’ is an extremely difficult machine to stop and it continues to grow every day. His anime already has about 1,100 episodes and the manga exceeds 100 compilation volumes that smash sales records.
After 25 years of publication, ‘One Piece’ is one of the longest active series that we can face right now. In fact, it exceeds twenty thousand pages of content, and if they are united in the same volume, we could hardly open it.
No hands to hold it
The artist Ilan Manuach has compiled all of Eiichiro Oda’s manga into one, with which he has found a book of 21,450 pages. This edition is called ONE PIECE and collects all the issues in Japanese with a sewn binding that has already been put up for sale and sold out in a few days.
the french publisher JBE Books put 50 unique copies on sale for la whopping 1900 euros and they have all flown. Unfortunately, this volume is not functional at all and it is impossible to read directly. Opening it would mean damaging the spine, and with the number of pages you can barely go from one to another, so it has more than anything an aesthetic function.
This edition has raised some blisters, because in fact Eiichiro Oda is not credited within the artistic project of Manouacheven though it is his work that has been printed, reformatted, and sold.
From JBE Books they maintain that there is no violation of copyright, because the volume is impossible to read and is practically a sculpture, but from the publisher Shueisha have made it clear that they do not support the project, that the volume of ‘One Piece’ is not official and that those in charge of publishing the manga in France is the Glénat publishing house.
According to Manouach, his goal is to comment on the nature of comics and how they have become similar to trading cards, as they have cultural value for readers but purely monetary value for collectors.
“ONEPIECE can only be seen as the embodiment of the media-saturated ecosystem of digital comics,” said the artist. “ONEPIECE exists solely as an object of pure speculation.”