The Three Big Part III : One Piece

"As a child, Monkey D. Luffy dreamed of becoming the King of the Pirates. But his life changed when he accidentally gained the power to stretch like rubber…at the cost of never being able to swim again! Now Luffy, with the help of a motley collection of pirate wannabes, is setting off in search of the "One Piece," said to be the greatest treasure in the world..."

The One Piece manga, written, drawn, and created by Eiichiro Oda, is originally published by Shueisha in Japanese for sale in Japan. In the west, the English adaptation is published and distributed for sale in North America and Australia by VIZ Media in both the form of the American Shonen Jump magazine and graphic novels. The first artbook, Color Walk 1 has also been released in English. The second book has yet to be released in North America.

The manga began its serial run in issue #34 of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine on August 4, 1997, while the anime adaptation produced by Toei Animation premiered on Fuji TV on October 20, 1999.

Eiichiro Oda originally planned One Piece to last five years, and he had already planned out the ending, but he found himself enjoying the story too much to end it in that amount of time, and now has no idea how long it will take to reach that point. Nevertheless, the author states (as of July 2007) that the ending is still the one he had decided on from the beginning, and he is committed to seeing it through to the end, no matter how many years it takes.

One Piece is the third highest selling manga in the history of Weekly Shonen Jump, (being beaten by Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Ko-en-mae Hashutsujo (Kochi Kame) and Dragon Ball) and is currently their most acclaimed and all-time third-best-selling title in Japan. The manga is so well-liked that it is the first to increase the sales of Weekly Shonen Jump in eleven years. Volume 25 of One Piece holds a manga sales record in Japan, with 2,630,000 units sold in its first printing alone; as of Volume 46, the series has sold over 140,000,000 copies domestically, and is the fastest manga to reach sales of 100,000,000.