After 25 years of existence and 490 million copies sold worldwide, the
One Piece
manga phenomenon is entering its final phase, its author, Japanese Eiichiro Oda, announced on Tuesday.
The manga, whose plot currently focuses on the feudal Japan-centric Wano saga, will be on hiatus for a month starting at the end of June and will resume on July 25.
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New pages are usually published every Monday in Japan in Shueisha's popular manga weekly
Shonen Jump
.
“
I want to rearrange the structure
(of
One Piece,
editor’s note)
in order to complete the final chapter as quickly as possible.
So... Forgive me but I'm going to take a little break to prepare everything!
explained Eiichiro Oda in a handwritten message posted on the manga team's official Twitter account at Shonen Jump.
“
We had the info for a few weeks, but we were waiting for it to be formalized on the Japanese side
”, confirmed to AFP Glénat, the publisher of the series in France, the second largest manga market in the world.
Since the publication of volume 1 in 1997 in Japan, the hunt for the "One Piece", a treasure coveted by all pirates and in the first place Monkey D. Luffy, hero of the series, today has to his credit more than a hundred volumes and a thousand chapters.
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The adventures of the straw hat pirate never cease to fascinate the whole world: the manga has also established itself as one of the most popular animated series in the world.
Eiichiro Oda (47) was even awarded a “Guinness World Record” in the category of “most copies of the same comic published by a single author”.
The Netflix streaming platform, which is preparing the upcoming release of a series adapted from the
One Piece
universe , released the first images of its adaptation on Monday, without revealing the release date.
Unlike
One Piece
, another cult manga, considered finished, will finally resume service.
This is
Berserk
by Kentaro Miura, Japanese mangaka who died at the beginning of May, at the age of 54, from a rare disease.
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It is his best friend Koji Mori who will continue his work, supported by the Hakusensha publishing house, he said in a statement posted on Twitter on Tuesday.
“
I will only write the episodes that Miura told me about.
I will not deviate.
I won't write episodes that I can't remember clearly.
I will only write the lines and the stories that Miura described to me
,” he stressed.