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A battle scene featuring Monkey D. Luffy in the newest One Piece chapter has sparked debate on 5ch’s general ‘Anything Goes’ live-discussion board (Nandemo Jikkyō). The panel showing Luffy dodging a giant’s blow used exaggerated gag-style art — his eyes popping out, his tongue stretching — drawing a wave of criticism calling it “gross” and “hard to follow visually,” while other posters defended it as simply “Oda’s idea of what makes One Piece feel like One Piece,” leaving opinion split. Some also pointed to reader survey data suggesting the manga’s core readership is skewing older.
What people said
but pulling it out during what should be the tense, climactic endgame doesn't even work as a joke.
Pretty sure it's us old-guard veteran readers who are the ones getting bullied here, as always.
Beauty and Sensei Torpedo's straight-man reactions are what gave the crazy gags proper rhythm and contrast — that was genius work (characters from Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo).
Nah, it's just ripped off from old Showa-era American cartoons.
Oda's said something like it'd be a waste not to use Showa-era techniques.
But manga comes in all kinds of styles — cram in every old trick and you just end up with a bland one-size-fits-all menu.
Let's be blunt: his drawing skill hasn't kept pace with what he's trying to pull off.
That crew's a lost cause.
Yep.
That's just lame. Maybe he should quit doing battle manga.
If he pulled the same stunt with the sacred sword Honebami Tōshirō, I'd actually give him credit.
though I guess that's just going by this one page alone.
Giant swings a hammer at the devil
↓
Luffy gets an idea and leaps in front of the hammer
↓
Gets crushed by the hammer while pulling a weird face and shouting a comeback
↓
Next page, he uses the hammer's own momentum to punch back
You, on the other hand, have pretty much stopped defending the content at all lately…
Exactly this. Talk about a letdown, for real.
Feels like he's just being stubborn about it at this point.
It used to be so easy to follow, what happened…😭
If you showed this guy the pre-Grand Line fights, his eyes would probably pop right out of his head.
Yeah, it just triggers real gut-level disgust.
Whoever thinks this looks good has broken taste, and the Jump editors who greenlit it clearly aren't doing their job anymore.
Without the artist's skill and knack for stylized deformation, you end up with a trainwreck like this One Piece panel.
But remember, when Blue-Eyes got turned into a Toon card, its owner Kaiba felt the ultimate humiliation, right?
It's sad to see our One Piece's Luffy get "toonified" like that.
Looking at this, in Tom and Jerry the original eyes stay put, so it just reads as a "shocked" expression — that's about all I get from it.
Maybe he avoided copying it exactly so people wouldn't call it a ripoff, but the One Piece version isn't a stylistic device at all, it's just a deformity.
Simply put, there's a real gap in taste and restraint between the two artists.
Whether you've seen the movie The Mask or not probably determines how immune you are to this.
I like The Mask, but Oda's version feels like a shallow copy and it's just gross 🤢
The Mask works because of the dynamic movement in the actual film — doing this in a still image is a bit much. Might work better animated.
I've seen The Mask, but I don't think that's really the point here.
Why did he abandon this direction?
Background and key points of this discussion
One Piece has run in Weekly Shonen Jump since 1997, and from early on it has consistently mixed exaggerated gag-style art — like eyes popping out — into even its serious scenes. The thread’s disagreement centered on whether to accept this as a defining quirk the series has had from the start, or to see it as jarring now that the story has entered its tense, climactic final arc. Notably, most of the critical comments weren’t really objecting to the art style itself so much as questioning its balance against serious plot developments — a nuance that’s easy to miss amid the simpler “bad art” complaints. Also, the cited reader survey data has no clearly stated source, so the numbers themselves haven’t been verified.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyō G) thread “[Bad News] One Piece’s latest chapter: Monkey D. Luffy declares “Get ready, devil-!!”“.
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