If there’s two things I love it’s One Piece and Talisman. And once I discovered that Strange Eons had a Talisman plugin, my mind turned to thinking of how to realise One Piece characters in Talisman. That one above is just a test, the Strange Eons program is really easy to get to grips with, the hard part will be figuring out the special abilities and creating the portraits – transparency is supported so you can get them looking kind of Talismany.

Zoro’s an easy one, as you can simulate the three swords thing easily in game and likewise his propensity for getting lost. Not sure if the three weapon thing is too big an advantage or if that extra die in the Crypts or Mines is a killer disadvantage.

The other neat thing is that One Piece gashapons should make nice counters for the characters too! I’ve a bunch from the Skypiea arc, and I’m afraid this is going to get me collecting gashapons again now I have a “practical” use for them (and probably not just One Piece too.)

Since the beginning of the year, or thereabouts, One Piece has embarked on its most ambitious storyline yet. We’re just over halfway through the series and the characters are geographically halfway through their journey. So we’ve had 8 months now of huge storyline events that dwarf everything that’s come before.

On top of that we’ve had the anime catch up to the start of those huge events, it getting paired with Dragonball Kai in the schedule, the promise of the tenth One Piece film with Oda’s involvement and the promise of anime-only material that ties directly to the manga.

All this has boosted One Piece’s profile something crazy. Already easily the top manga in Japan, its Google Trending has more than doubled since the start of the year. And in the last two weeks, the strip has shifted up into yet another gear.

The last two chapters have been full of huge splash pages full of epic vistas, and more importantly, full of individual characters. Oda’s approached this level of insane crowd scenes before, but the sheer amount of wonderful looking badass weirdos he’s unleashed onto the page in the last two weeks is awe inspiring. The anime has struggled to match this in the past, and I question how well this is going to look when they animate it in a year or so. And how sane the animators will be after animating it.

There’s a couple of other key elements to the impact of the story. There’s a major revelation made in chapter 550 that flips a lot of things on their head, and we finally get to see a character who we’ve been told is powerful for years now, demonstrate that power and actually live up to the hype.

But that’s all for nought without Oda’s illustrations. Not only does he maximise the impact of those important scenes so well, he’s also giving you so many characters that you want to know more about just from one appearance. Why does that guy look like walrus? Why does that guy have clamps for hands? Why is that guy’s beard and hat so ridiculously large? And so on. And the fun thing is that the series has already proven that we will certainly get to see more of some of them. Nothing can ever be dismissed as a single panel throwaway in One Piece, that one guy you saw 9 years ago could end up being one of the most important people in the world!

(via kunion’s cafe)

They can still make me tear up 380 episodes in.

Bink’s Sake:

Lyrics by Eiichiro Oda, Music by Kohei Tanaka, Chō as Brook.

With Naruto showing up in Yahoo’s top ten searches, discussion moved to who uses Yahoo anyway as if to dismiss it’s popularity. After all surely Google is the important search application nowadays?

Well I thought to check the Google Zeigeist, but that appears to be long gone, replaced by the wonderful Google Trends. And there we can see the power of Naruto.

Naruto vs. Yahoo’s top search, Britney Spears – A clear victory for Naruto, and we see that searches for “naruto” have been continually growing the last 4 years as opposed to Britney’s popularity ebbing and flowing with events in her life.

Now lets add the next three in their chart – Naruto is still on top. In fact it takes getting elected as President to push Barack Obama over our ninja chum.

And lets see how it compares to the two other big anime franchises that have hit the west – Overall Pokemon has Naruto beat over the last four years, but is in decline. Dragonball been maintaining a steady march for a franchise it’s age.

Looking at all these figures, is it any wonder that Viz & TV Tokyo are looking stream Naruto for free? If you’re getting that many searches for your product you want to aim them at your content – and in turn advertising. If any title can make that model work it’s Naruto.

One last thing, Naruto vs. One Piece vs. Bleach vs. Gintama (in Japanese) – here however Naruto is in decline, with Gintama being the series on the rise (from the sudden rise in 06, we can assume the anime has had a definite effect on its popularity). One Piece ebbs and flows but invariably is the most popular of the Shonen Jump properties (at least among folks who want to find information about it on the internet).

Not the greatest of these, but it’s two of my favourite series mashed up.

via SWFBLOG

The Milestones of Quality and Quantity – The “100 Million Copies” Best-Seller Comics Award ComiPress.

Astro Boy, Black Jack, Doraemon, Dragonball, Slam Dunk, Touch, Fist of the North Star, Detective Conan, One Piece, Golgo 13, Oishinbo & Kochikame – the twelve 100 million manga sellers. Comi Press has a translated article from ACGTalk about these landmark titles.

YouTube – 【手書き】ワンピで女子高生EDパロ.

This is the Girl’s High ED re-drawn/re-animated to feature One Piece characters. Mostly stills but on the whole they do a good job of drawing One Piece characters in Yasuomi Umetsu’s style without just being re-colours of the original art.