Stephanie Brown: Fugitive.  For about a second.

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Over the past week, I’ve watched a handful of episodes of One Piece on Hulu, picked up half a dozen new and old albums on Amazon across a variety of genres, bought eight issues of Eric Shanower and Skottie Young’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for reading on my iPod, added samples of a couple ebooks to the same, and purchased Persona 3 Portable for my PSP. The whats don’t really matter here. People buy things all the time, and I’m no different. The how, though, is pretty interesting when you think about it. I did most of this from my couch, and no physical media was involved. It was entirely digital. And without piracy, I don’t think it would have happened at all.

Companies, or corporations, or whatever, are generally conservative. Once they have a revenue stream, they will squeeze it until it’s dry, and then keep squeezing, just in case. When faced with a new way of making money, they will first try to graft old business models onto it and essentially make money the same way they always have. When forced, they will embrace new paradigms, but not without a fight.

On top of that, businesses are by their nature hostile to consumers. They want your money, first and foremost, and anything that allows them to maximize the amount of your money they get is probably going to be fair game. When Jay-Z said, “I’m a hustler, homey/ You a customer, crony” in “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” he summed up exactly how the consumer and manufacturer relationship works. They’re about money, and if you have money, you’re a target.

In the past, if you wanted to watch a tv show, you had to tune in at the right time or hope someone taped it for you (which was probably technically illegal). If you wanted to buy an album or hear a song, you needed the radio or a record shop. Video games? Go to Funcoland. Books? Hit the library. And on and on and on.

The internet, and piracy, changed that forever. For the first time, non-physical media became a possibility. MP3s caused a catastrophic drop in the perceived value of music. Being able to store hundreds, or thousands, of songs on a computer, and later an mp3 player, makes you rethink how you approach music. You don’t have to buy albums that are half filler just to get the two or three songs you like. You can just get those songs. Even if you like all of an album, you don’t need a six foot high stack of jewel cases any more. It fits in your pocket.

The record industry reacted conservatively, or maybe with abject horror. Rather than leaping on the format, which was small enough to be downloaded easily even over 56k (bitrate depending), the RIAA moved to block anything that could play it. Later, they tried to eradicate it by creating un-rippable CDs. Still later, once they realized it wasn’t going to go away, they produced their own portable music format. This was loaded with software that let you play your music at their discretion, and only on machines or via software that they allow. Years later, they gave up on DRM and finally let you have what you paid for, playable on whatever you want, whenever you want.

Years ago, I modded my first Xbox. It took nothing but a bit of video game and a file loaded onto a memory card. After that, I could copy games I bought to my Xbox’s hard drive, or just straight up download games and do the same. It was absurdly convenient, and made things like Halo parties or marathoning games with friends much, much simpler. Same for the PlayStation 2, after the hard drive for that dropped.

There are plenty of other examples. Downloading movies, books, anime, tv shows… comic books. Take your pick. Piracy changed how people, normal people, consume media. The free price point is worth a lot, obviously, but the convenience and ability to do what you want with what you’re consuming counts for even more, I’d say. If I wanted to kick a friend or cousin a song I liked, I could do that. If I wanted to play a bunch of games at somebody’s house without bringing over eighteen cases, I could do that.

It’s years later now, and things aren’t much different in effect. If I want to go over a friend’s house for some games, I throw my PS3 into a backpack and head over. At most, I’ll grab Rock Band 3 and the keyboard. When I go to watch TV, a movie, or the Ohio State game, I get on my computer or PS3. When I want to read a book, I don’t pick up something made of dead trees. I pick up a little electronic device.

The method of execution, though, is definitely different. I can pay for all of this now, and I get content when and how I want it at a price I think is reasonable. I recognize that I am a target, but I don’t feel like I’m being victimized or gouged by someone’s quest for profit. Just flicking through my Amazon playlist on iTunes, which contains everything I’ve bought from there, I can guesstimate that I buy a new album every couple of weeks. The rest of my collection is filled out with free mp3s direct from the artists themselves, mixtapes, or things I’ve found on Bandcamp. I use Netflix for movies, Hulu for TV, and ESPN3 for sports. Amazon’s Kindle service puts books in my hand less than a minute after I buy them, and I read them on the same thing that plays music. I recently got a PSP (again) and decided that I’d not buy any of those dumb little discs for it. Why should I? I can turn on my PSP or PS3, click an icon, navigate to what I want, click “Checkout” and bam, it’s downloading. I don’t need discs any more.

What do I want? Everything. When do I want it? Now. This is the world we live in.

Am I endorsing piracy? Obviously not. If you don’t support the arts, there won’t be any arts. Every idiot who ever had something they liked cancelled on them could tell you that. Culture doesn’t grow on trees. But, at the same time, it is what it is. Piracy isn’t going to go away. People counterfeited Renaissance-era art. We used to get bootleg tapes from the man at the barbershop. If people are going to pirate, they’re gonna pirate, and to be perfectly frank, you can’t stop them. Weed is still illegal, but I guarantee if I wanted a half ounce I could make a call after work and have it before dinner, possibly even in dessert form. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t mean it isn’t easy to find.

I don’t think you should try to justify piracy, or anything you do that’s legally wrong. I think that’s just another way of lying to yourself. That’s just childish. But at the same time, this sort of hardline, “We have to eradicate piracy!” stance that shows up in places like the comments here on Johanna Draper-Carlson’s latest post about piracy? That’s a fantasy. It’s got no basis in reality. It makes about as much sense as all the nonsense I was taught in DARE as part of the War on Drugs and is probably a third as effective. Telling someone “This is bad!” hasn’t stopped anyone from doing anything since the Garden of Eden. Most people will do the right thing out of the goodness of their own heart, but if somebody’s gonna pirate? They’re gonna pirate, doggie, and they’re gonna keep ignoring you. Ask Nancy Reagan about how effective the War on Drugs has been sometime. It’s cool that you disagree or whatever, but those of us here are trying to talk about the real world, where mean things happen and you can’t do anything about it.

It’s unfair, but that’s life. Life sucks. Wish I could say otherwise, but, hey, it is what it is. And it isn’t going away. So, all that’s left to do is look at why people are flocking to pirated goods. The answer isn’t “because it’s free.” That’s a significant part of the equation, to be sure, but it isn’t the whole story. And if you’re trying to fix piracy, for whatever value of “fix” you personally hold, and you aren’t looking at the entire picture, you’re a fool. You can’t judge the width and breadth of something by looking at it with a microscope.

Not all pirates are customers. Every torrent completed on Demonoid isn’t a lost sale. Some people download stuff just to be downloading. They like the e-cred, or they’re completely OCD and it’s easier to count mp3s than bits of straw. It is pretty much impossible to discern between pirates and potential customers, but arguing as if all the people who downloaded your joint off Demonoid would’ve bought it is lunacy. I see a lot of guys walking around with girls in this city, but that doesn’t mean every single girl was a potential girlfriend that I’ve now lost forever thanks to someone getting in the way. A few of them? Sure. Most of them? Yeah, sure, I believe that on days when my ego is completely out of control. But all of them? That’s crazy talk.

The music, video game, publishing, and film industries, once they got done recoiling in abject horror and pretending piracy had no redeeming value at all, finally listened to the people who wanted to be their customers rather than pirates. They gave us what we want in a way that benefits both of us. I get to pay for things I want and in a format I’m cool with and they get what’s basically a constant stream of money shooting out of my wallet.

If you want to fight piracy, you have to be better than piracy. Crap advice? Maybe, but it applies in almost every aspect of life. Want to make more money than the brown-nosing douchebag down the hall? Make yourself more attractive to your employer than he is. Want to date someone, but your predatory homeboy is after the same girl you are? Be better than him. If you want to compete against people with an unfair advantage, you do better or you lose. And even then, sometimes, you still lose.

A huge selling point of digital media is convenience. That makes convenience into an anti-piracy measure. It gives me a choice. I can hop onto rapidshare and download an album, then possibly re-tag, and then add album art, and then add it to iTunes, or I can kick Amazon five to ten bucks and get some high-quality audio, (usually) properly tagged, and with some nice album art built in. Nine times out of ten these days, I choose Amazon.

Achievements and Trophies on 360 and PS3 are other anti-piracy measures. You don’t get to partake in competing with your friends over your gamerscore if you pirate. If you don’t believe that score chasing is a huge part of gaming culture right now, find out how many of your Xbox owning friends played through King Kong because it gave away 1000 gamerpoints around launch time. Make sure to ask them if they enjoyed playing through that game, too. Go ahead. I’ll wait. No, I won’t, because the answer is “almost all of them” and “none of them,” in that order.

Piracy changed the game. It has hurt a lot of people, and that sucks, but at the same time, it’s created a world where being conservative makes you a dinosaur. It’s forced companies to evolve and actually listen to what their customers want. The world changed. Screaming about how illegal or unfair it is isn’t going to fix much. We’re at a point where almost all of the medium we consume is being adjusted to fit into a brand new paradigm. Whether comics or movies or tv or music, physical media is diversifying and digital media is rapidly expanding. Everything changes, usually for unfair reasons. Pay attention to what came before, look at what people want, and adjust accordingly. You can evolve or die.

It’s been announced today that Rick Remender and Tony Moore — the guys who game us Fear Agent and Frankencastle — are joining forces once again for another ongoing.

Yes, Venom #1 will be released this coming March. Although the host is a secret (from what I hear, it’s totally John Jameson), the alien/human hybrid will be off trying to save the world under the government’s watch. Sure, this is the third time Venom’s worked as a government lackey, but I don’t stop eating pizza because I’ve had it twice before. Here’s a look at Venom-Wolf’s not-slobbering-and-crazy-for-human-flesh appearance.

So, yeah. I’m completely on board.

The real question is what do I have to do to become the guy who writes the “Venom Saga” backup in the first issue?

Oh my god, he’s right.

I still don’t know how to pronounce it, though.

get three coffins ready
created: Just a couple. You can read me talmbout Dan Abnett/Andy Lanning & Brad Walker’s Heroes for Hire or a round-up of the current slate of Batman-centric comics. I’ll have a gang of goodies next week.

my mistake, four coffins
consumed:
–

Brandon Graham’s King City 12.

Did you read that? Stellar end to a stellar series, and definitely one of my favorites of 2010. Cripes, man. The first thing I wanted to do after reading King City 12 was to read King City 12 again, but slower. And after that, I wanted to reread 1-12. Which I will do, and you will reap the whirlwind here, but I have to put that off and let it settle for a week. But seriously: if you weren’t reading King City, and apparently it sold like three thousand copies or so a month so a lot of you weren’t reading it, you missed out on some good comics. Only a few comics came close to even touching it this year.

-Takeshi Koike’s Redline is in the middle of an encore presentation at New People, so I saw it for the second time on Monday. I wrote a review for CA after my first viewing, and you know what? I liked it even better the second time around. It’s distilled spectacle, determined to give you whiplash from the hard cuts and harder action scenes. Every single frame demands more attention than you have to give, simply by virtue of being filled with information. The cast is full of character sketches (sexy girls, tv stars, hard-working earth dudes, a renegade cop, a cool dude, a cool girl, a MACHINE GOD), but all of it hangs together perfectly. The sketches are clever enough to support their own shorts, even. It’s funny, it’s frantic, and I’m glad it exists. It’s counterprogramming for all the moe stuff that’s dominating the anime industry, which probably explains the reports of it not doing very well at all in Japan. Buy the Blu-ray when they drop it.

-I bought the self-titled Hard Nips EP. I read a review on the Mishka blog about it and liked the single “Release It,” so I threw four bucks at it. I don’t really have a frame of reference for this kind of music. If it was rap, I could tell you what year it sounds like and who had an influence on the flow, but this is all new to me. I think I like it. I have a hard time with Yoko Sawai’s accent on a couple songs, but I like the way it sounds. It’s very heavy, with deep sounding guitars and vocals that feel like they’re climbing out of the music. If they drop a full album or another joint, I’d pick it up.

-Bilal’s Airtight’s Revenge is unexpectedly good. Not that I don’t like Bilal, but it’s been a good while since I really sat down and listened to some old fashioned neo-soul/R&B sanging cat. He’s hitting those high notes like D’Angelo used to, and the album is overall pretty strong. Clever, emotional, on and on. I like it more than Cee-Lo’s The Lady Killer, which is itself inferior to his Stray Bullets mixtape. Apparently they’re all from the same sessions, which makes The Lady Killer being aight pretty weird. Stray Bullets bangs.

-Redman’s Redman Presents…Reggie is… aight. Kinda disappointed. It makes me want to listen to Red Gone Wild, mostly. Just aight isn’t good enough these days.

-Been listening to a lot of Blur. Really digging Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife.

-B.o.B dropped a new mixtape, No Genre. Unsurprisingly, I cosign it. There’s a joint with TI, Bobby Ray, and Young Dro over a flipped version of the Sanford & Son beat. Quincy Jones on production. It disappeared off his official site, though. Label issues?

-Been reading Dragon Ball Z in Vizbigs. It’s been years since I’ve read DBZ in Shonen Jump, but I apparently never read this stuff. It sticks pretty close to the show, so there aren’t a lot of general surprises, but there are a few specific ones. Vegeta turning into a monkey I’d entirely forgotten about, for example.

-I bought Persona 3 Portable. I’ve been playing Persona 4 off and on for about two years now, more off than on, and figured I might as well check this one out, too. Gives me something to do before bed, anyway.

–Here’s some vintage Wally Wood. This guy was so good.

i don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’
David:
Esther: Yes: Batgirl 16, DCU Holiday Special, Knight and Squire 3, Superboy 2 Maybe: Batman Annual 12, First Wave 5, Red Robin 18
Gavin: Booster Gold 39, Justice League Generation Lost 15, Knight & Squire 3, Welcome To Tranquility One Foot Grave 6, Chaos War Ares 1, Incredible Hulks 618, New Avengers 7, What If Wolverine Father

It is customary for people to say nice things about the people they’re promoting.  Dan Didio had this to say:

“Mark is the kind of artist, editor and collaborator who is invaluable in not only his knowledge of the craft but his ability to inspire and pull out the very best work from the creators with whom he works.  He’s a true artist’s artist.  Mark Chiarello is one of the most respected figures in the comic book industry.  From NEW FRONTIER to SOLO to WEDNESDAY COMICS, he’s spearheaded projects that helped elevate our expectations for what the art form can accomplish.”

It’s rare to see a glowing review and completely agree with it.  So many words of praise are basically strained out through gritted teeth because something is good enough and it’s not right to hang anyone out to dry.  This isn’t one of those times.  I can’t tell you about the success of projects like Solo and Batman: Black and White, although the fact that Solo isn’t around anymore is probably an indication, but artistically they’re stand-out books.

Mark Chiarello has a good history of finding artists who can do thoughtful, interesting takes on characters.  He has a history of giving these projects formats that make them little sensations within the comics community, so that everyone has an eye out for them on Wednesday.  I often notice when people are really good writers, and occasionally I notice good artists.  It’s rare that I notice excellent editors.  I think that Mark Chiarello is one of them.  He picks good people to do work.  He gives them good projects.  And he makes sure that those projects have a fighting chance in a really tough market.  This guy is great at his job.

According to the DC Source post, “This newly-created position will oversee the operations of DC’s Editorial Art Department and lead in establishing the style, visual look and graphic design across all of DC’s imprints.”  Being a story girl, I’d prefer him to go nuts on storyboarding, but any influence is a good influence.  I’ve rarely been so happy about a press release.

-This is the best cold open ever.
-We start with a summary of Jean-Paul Sarte’s No Exit to kick things off.
-We argue over the ethics and logistics of Johnny Cash’s “I Shot A Man In Reno.”
-It gets surprisingly complex.
-Then we get to the point!
-This week’s show is about superheroes, settings, and the way they fit together.
-Sometimes the setting is a help to the hero, sometimes it’s a hindrance.
-Esther sums it up as “Let the hero fit the setting.”
-What heroes work well in certain genres?
-What heroes don’t work well in other genres?
-True story: a couple times during this podcast, my sink made noises like the blog was coming out of it.
-This made both of us go :O and turn our heads toward my kitchen.
-There was nothing in the sink, though, which I actually found more troubling than the noise itself.
-Regardless, I edited most of that stuff out, but maybe if you listen closely, you’ll get lucky.
-Maybe it’s due to the Ghostbusters II-esque bubbling, you can consider this the revenge of the Digressioncast.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

Subscribe to the Fourcast! via:
–Podcast Alley feed!
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We got a lot of good panels from me and David and Was Taters and Space Jawa. Shockingly, not one of us included a single panel from Shadowland/Daredevil. That’s too bad.

Great week for me, though. For one, there’s more WWE Heroes insanity. Taskmaster has concluded, finalizing that it’s a depressingly great miniseries. Then there’s a mundane What If issue featuring an amazing backup story that I’ve included for its own panel. Even still, there are three more parts to it!

Oh, and Taters was late in reading last week’s pile, so there’s a Thor: The Mighty Avenger in there.

Action Comics Annual #13
Paul Cornell, Marco Rudy and Ed Benes

Ant-Man & Wasp #2
Tim Seeley

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One Piece! Manga Movable Feast! I could do an essay, but I think this will let me hit more of what I enjoy about the series so much. In short, though, it’s the best adventure comic, consistently good, and even when it’s less good, it’s still better than a whole lot of comics. That’s not a manga thing, either–it’s good comics, full stop. Here’s a series of observations why it’s so good, running from early in the series to late:

-Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece feels like the child of Dragon Ball and classic Looney Tunes/Tom & Jerry shorts. It being a post-Dragon Ball work is kind of obvious like Veronica Mars being post-Buffy is obvious–Luffy is definitely in the Goku mold, though exponentially dumber, and the escalating stakes over the course of the series should be familiar to anyone who’s even accidentally seen an episode of Dragon Ball Z–but the humor isn’t as much of a direct descendent. It’s a little more sophisticated. Not by much, Sanji’s whole gimmick is proof positive of that, but maybe like two notches on the “dumb joke” dial.

-The Looney Tunes/Tom & Jerry stuff is harder to pin down. I hesitate to call it an influence the way I can with DB, but there’s definitely a connection to be made. One Piece has the usual manga physical humor, like Nami handing out dummy smacks to every guy in the cast despite being the second weakest member of the crew, but it’s delivered alongside gags based around subverted expectations and hardcore slapstick. That’s stuff that I definitely associate with Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry. Luffy’s pliable body lends itself very well to that kind of stuff, which is probably why I made that connection in the first place. Maybe I’m off-base, but I haven’t been able to get the comparison out of my head.

-This clip is pretty much exactly what I mean. The humor isn’t quite the same as what you’d see in DB, but it wouldn’t be out of place in something like Duck Amuck.

-The fights are deeper than “Who’s stronger, him or me?” Luffy is strong, but he isn’t the strongest pirate in the series. He’s got determination, and that tends to make the difference, but he gets stomped out fairly regularly. What makes the difference in the fights, other than surprise new special techniques, are teh gimmicks. Luffy’s made of rubber, and that means he has certain advantages and disadvantages to play with. You can see this in an early episode where, rather than letting him drown, Luffy’s friends pull his head above the water, stretching his neck. Later, when fighting Eneru, a guy who has steamrolled everyone ever with his electrical powers, Luffy shows up. Eneru blasts him and whoops, look at that, electricity doesn’t work on Luffy because he’s made of rubber. That sort of thinking works for me, and it was so blindingly obvious that you don’t even see it coming.

-Nami has an interesting position in the cast. Up until Robin joins, Nami is the only person with even an ounce of common sense in her head. This means she spends a lot of time pissed off and trying to keep the boys in line. It’d be easy for her to come off as a killjoy, but instead, she’s absurdly sympathetic. The crew of the Going Merry are, in a word, insane, and she is the lone spot of sanity in the group. I’ve seen a lot of anime with pretty unsympathetic female leads, but something about Nami is just awesome.

-Nami’s Clima Tact, a weapon that lets her control the weather, is very cool, too. It doesn’t make a lick of sense if you look at it too hard, but in terms of execution on the page and visually, it’s great. It’s not just a magic wand, it plays directly to her strengths as a normal human, and it’s effective.

-Sanji is Gambit from the X-Men crossed with Pepe LePew, from the French to the loverboy reputation. Oda’s hardline “Romance plots? Pfffffthahahahahaha yeah right buddy” keeps him from becoming completely obnoxious. His earnest dedication to Nami and Robin is funny, from creating special dishes just for them (which the crew immediately eats) to withholding the good food from the non-lady members of the crew.

-Sanji brings me to the next point–the fashion. Oda has a fantastically awful sense of design. A lot of characters look like they were designed by throwing darts at a board, but then, inexplicably, their designs somehow manage to hang together enough to actually be cool Don Quixote Doflamingo is a tornado of feathers, capri pants, sunglasses, and a waggling tongue, but he works. Rob Lucci is a guy in a suit with a pigeon on his shoulder that wears a fur coat.

-Rob Lucci is the greatest.

-Oda’s sense of design manifests itself in various ways. Other than stupidly awesome looking characters, he switches up the clothing of the main cast regularly. Nami, in addition to being greedy, loves shopping. Sometimes that just means shopping and sometimes it means actually buying new clothes. Nami, Sanji, and Robin changes clothes the most, I’d say, with Zolo and Luffy a few steps behind. It makes each arc feel fresh, and also gives us a better glimpse into the lives of the characters. Some outfits are less successful than others, but hey, everyone has bad clothes days.

-The animals in the series are just as weird as everything else. The South Bird is a giant parrot-thing that can only face south. Laboon is a huge whale with a guy who sometimes hangs out in its belly. There are giant, bear-sized rabbits who live in a winter wonderland. There are both merfolk and fish people. The monsters that litter the ocean are basically just regular animals adjusted for deep sea life, like a cow with fins, and scaled up 1000%. There are alligators crossed with bananas. There’s a sword named Funkfreed that ate the Elephant-Elephant Fruit. Chopper is a reindeer who ate the Human-Human Fruit and is now a… what, a were-reindeer? He squeaks when he walks. Get it?

-I like Bon Clay because of this:

-I also like Bon Clay because his design is so off the wall. The onion-waist, thick eye shadow, crown, ballet slippers, and everything else are the sartorial equivalent of a word jumble that accidentally spells out “awesome.”

-Bon Clay is actually emblematic of the main theme of One Piece, which is that friendship conquers all. He begins as a friend. He accidentally ends up on the Strawhat’s ship, they hang out, have some fun, and then he leaves. Later, it’s revealed that he works for Baroque Works and answers to Crocodile, the villain of the arc. He battles Sanji, gives him props after he loses the fight, and then, still later, helps the Strawhats escape from the Marines. When he shows up later, there’s no animosity and Luffy greets him like an old friend. Bon Clay responds in kind. Helping the Strawhats escape served as a single brief act of redemption, but really, Bon Clay didn’t really need it. He’s a good guy because he likes Luffy and his crew. Friends look out for each other, so he looks out for them.

-Friendship is one of those things that’s pounded into your head over the course of the city, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Nico Robin’s tear-filled assertion that she wants to live during “Water 7” came about due to the fact that Luffy finally convinced her that she had friends.

-Buggy the Clown attempts to pervert the idea of friendship by using Luffy for his own gain, and it backfires wildly. The workers on Water 7 pretended to be friends with Paulie, another worker. Betrayal is treated as their true crime, even on top of brutalizing everyone they met. They broke the trust, and that simply isn’t cool. In Buggy’s case, selfishness is shown to be something to be avoided, otherwise you’re looking at a Spectre-style fate.

-Oda’s cast is huge. There are eight main characters, a sizable group for even an X-Men comic, but Oda manages to make it seem like every character gets a moment to shine. Sometimes he does this by taking Luffy entirely off the stage and letting someone else sit in the limelight. Usually, though, he uses that classic tactic of splitting the crew into smaller teams.

-The large size of the cast has the added effect of making the smaller teams interesting, too. Nami, Usopp, and Chopper make a good team because they’re all fairly easily frightened. At the same time, Nami, Sanji, and Robin make a great team because Sanji is a sucker. But then, if you put Sanji on a team with Zolo and Luffy, you’re looking at the three monsters of the crew, and they’ll bicker and fight and destroy all comers. Zolo and Chopper make an interesting duo, since Chopper is so young and earnest and Zolo is easily mislead. There’s a flexibility there that Oda is more than open to playing with, and it works to make the cast feel pretty intimate and diverse.

-Oda’s art, sense of design aside, doesn’t look like much of anything else. His characters are stretched out and warped to the point where even basic anime fanservice isn’t quite as fanservice-y as it should be. For some characters, the legs are too long, the arms too skinny, and the waists wasp thin. Other characters are built like Johnny Bravo–all upper body and stick legs. High foreheads (we used to call those fiveheads), long necks, and weird noses abound.

-It looks weird, but it works. Oda is great at cartooning, and starting off with completely unrealistic proportions actually makes the rest of the action easier to believe. Zolo’s Three Swords Style is stupid, a dumb joke for kids, but you take it seriously as you buy into the art and story. The art style certainly helped lower my suspension of disbelief, and made it much, much easier to get down with how weird the designs become later on.

-Oda’s approach to special attacks is pretty neat, too. Every character has a simple to understand starting point. One guy uses three swords, another can stretch, one kicks, another is good with the weather, yet another can grow body parts anywhere she can see. But then, the attacks they use is where things get interesting. Luffy uses his rubbery nature to increase his blood flow or to inflate his own limbs. Nico Robin can mix her limbs together, resulting in a series of hands with eyes in the center, or even wings. Sanji kicks, but when he gets mad enough, his kicks catch fire, because something something rage something love. If Chopper takes too many of his Rumble Balls, a performance enhancing drug, he flips out and loses control.

-Really, Franky is the only person the team who does normal things for his character type. He’s a cyborg that can punch hard, shoot projectiles, and so on. But then, when he has to do something simple like fashion a makeshift bridge, Franky does it between panels and does it so well that he has time to create really nice railings, and he still isn’t happy with how it turned out.

-Brook’s jokes are proof that the best jokes are bad ones.

-Usopp vs Perona is one of the best fights in the series.

-“Rob Lucci,” depending on where you from and what kind of slang you use, means “Take money.” Greatest Name Of All Time.

-Kalifa’s “That’s sexual harassment” made me laugh every time.

-Is it just me, or do Luffy and Lupin the 3rd laugh in the exact same way? That kind of wide mouth, eyes shut sort of thing? I’d be interested in seeing an exploration of how OP relates to other things from Japanese pop culture, but I don’t have the depth of knowledge necessary to do it justice.

David Welsh is running the One Piece Manga Movable Feast this month, and he asked me to take a look at “Baroque Works,” an arc in One Piece. I gave it some thought during some downtime and came up with a few ideas. This is post is something I came up with that doesn’t really fit into an exploration of the content of the series, but it’s definitely something interesting about “Baroque Works.”

The “Baroque Works” arc comes at an interesting point in Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. It spans roughly from the end of volume 12 to most of the way through volume 24, which puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of 2400 pages. Volumes 1-12 are collectively known as “East Blue,” but are instead more properly considered a collection of short stories and arcs rather than a long-term story arc. “Baroque Works,” though, is a monster, longer than Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (give or take a couple hundred pages). While it is composed of smaller stories–“Whiskey Peak,” “Drum Island,” that island with the giants whose name I forgot–those stories all work toward getting the crew to Alabasta. The first twelve volumes don’t have that unifying theme, beyond the goal of getting to the Grand Line. There’s no major villain lurking in the shadows so much as a series of midbosses that Luffy and crew need to get past to make it to the Grand Line. Kuro, Axe Hand Morgan, and Arlong don’t quite have the same pop as Crocodile, and Buggy and Alvida are so funny as to be more comedic relief than true blue threats.

Thinking through the length: Conventional wisdom says that if you have a super long epic in mind, and 2400 pages is several pages past “super long,” you need to hook your readers in first. You need them to believe in your story before you throw them into the deep end. You don’t lead with the uppercut. You start with a jab to test the waters. It worked for Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso with 100 Bullets, which was sold as a morality tale and ended up being something almost entirely different. Azz and Risso hooked them and then got down to business. Oda did the same thing.

Follow along: The main cast of One Piece is made up of Luffy, Nami, Sanji, Zolo, and Usopp. Chopper joins partway through “Baroque Works,” and Nico Robin joins at the end of the tale in volume 24. The next member joins around 21 volumes (another 4200 pages) later, and the final member comes a handful of volumes later. For much of the series, the cast that is established going into “Baroque Works” is the cast of the series. They’re the core, the primary cast.

Okay, so what, he has a cast, even Queen’s Blade has those, big deal, who cares? Well, by the beginning of “Baroque Works”, after having already made it through around 2400 pages of getting to know the primary cast, we’ve built up a connection between us and them. We made it through the emotional minefield that is Nami’s origin, seen Zolo’s slightly less sad in comparison origin, gotten used to Luffy’s (let’s be fair here) complete idiocy, and realized that Sanji isn’t just another pretty face. If you’ve made it twelve volumes in, you’re a fan, is what I’m saying, and you get how the characters react and feel.

That provides a necessary foundation for “Baroque Works.” Without that foundation, like if Oda had started the series with volume 13, we’d be dealing with getting used to the primary cast, meeting Chopper, meeting Vivi and Carue, and then the conflict of the arc. That’s a lot to take in all at once, but since we know all of the principal characters, “Baroque Works” is allowed to move at its own pace.

Long story short, “Baroque Works” is interesting because of its length and focus. It seems like after completing “East Blue,” Oda felt comfortable enough in his craft and in his fanbase to do something with a bit more meat on its bones. After “Baroque Works” comes “Skypiea,” which is around ten volumes. “Water Seven” is fourteen volumes, “Thriller Bark” is five, and “Sabaody” ended up being just a couple volumes, though “Sabaody” leads directly to “Impel Down.” He got away with a long arc on “Baroque Works” and then knew he could get away with it again.

That’s all I got as far as meta reasons to pay attention to “Baroque Works.” I’ve got a list of things to cover in the big grabbag in the next post (tomorrow, maybe) that’ll cover “Baroque Works” and more, but really, the best reason to pay attention to this arc is that it includes Mr. 2, Bon Clay. Bon Clay stands alongside Don Quixote Doflamingo, Hawkeye Mihawk, Rob Lucci, Trafalgar Law, Carue, Chopper, Kiwi, and Mozu as some of the best characters in the series.