Eiichiro Oda

"My mentor taught me that ‘The World of Manga’ is a product, and if you start getting all preachy after people were kind enough to buy your stuff, it shows that you’re not a professional."

- Eiichiro Oda when asked what he thought of lewd fanart.

The creator of the long-running Shonen Manga One Piece, which is over six hundred chapters in length and still going strong. Noted for his unusual art style and eccentric and imaginative character designs.

Something of a manga prodigy, he won several awards with his manga Wanted! at the age of seventeen. This landed him a job at Shonen Jump despite his young age, but he worked only as an assistant at first; it was five years before he began a series of his own, but even then he started One Piece at the Improbable Age of 22. Despite having been in the industry for half his life, he is still known for having a fanboyish love of manga in general, especially Dragon Ball. His playful approach to his work has won him a lot of fans.

He also worked as an assistant on Rurouni Kenshin.


 * Author Appeal: Crossdressers. In the character design notes for Rurouni Kenshin, Nobuhiro Watsuki says that Kamatari, a crossdressing character, was inspired by one of his assistants suggesting a character based on the pun, an "okama with a kama", or a "crossdresser with a scythe". Although the assistant is not named, because of this trope, everybody guessed that this assistant was Eiichiro Oda. In a later interview, Nobuhiro Watsuki confirmed that this guess was true. Watsuki explains that Oda's original concept for Kamatari was a masculine looking crossdresser with effeminate mannerisms like the crossdressers in One Piece (Mr. 2 anyone?), but Watsuki had trouble drawing such a character and ended up making Kamatari a pretty crossdresser.
 * Don't forget: Afros.
 * Art Evolution: His art progressively became less cartoony, character designs (especially his women) are now more diverse, and his panel settings are also more detailed.
 * Brilliant but Lazy: He says he became a manga artist because they "don't have to do a real job", and that if he were an animal it would be a sloth ("that means serious business").
 * Bunny Ears Lawyer: Aside from many characters from his works, Oda himself is one- one of his earliest works is just about one of the silliest creations in the world of manga and anime (not helped by the fact that It Runs on Nonsensoleum), but it's been going strong for 15 years and is an excellent example of creative storytelling by use of a strong story continuation that just borders on Batman levels, well-developed settings and characters, and most of all, truckloads of unrepressed emotion.
 * Cast of Snowflakes: Indisputably a master of this trope, especially as One Piece went into its later years.
 * Chekhov's Gunman: HE SLEEPS WITH THEM!!!
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Read the manga itself, and combine it with his answers in his SBS column and responses to interviews.
 * Creator Breakdown: It's speculated that his anxiety over his wife's pregnancy was what inspired.
 * On a more humorous note, it's been joked (and outright stated) by the anime staff that the reason the amount of Fan Service spiked upward was because of Oda getting married and being horny for his very attractive wife (a well-known ex-Cosplay Otaku Girl) all the time, to the displeasure of fans who liked the general lack of such things in the manga early on. For a guy who prefers not emphasizing romance that's not an obvious huge joke in his stories, he sure is a massive softie for his family.
 * Gonk: Of all shapes and sizes. No, not Oda himself.
 * Hot Dad
 * Happily Married: With two kids. Aww.
 * It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Many of Oda's SBS answers to questions about how things work in the series.
 * Mr. Fanservice: The men in One Piece are often really cool. Or hot. Or badass. Or a combination of all those three.
 * Name's the Same: Why he's apparently a fan of Oda Nobunaga.
 * One of Us: A huge fan of Dragon Ball, Dragon Quest, Tim Burton and Eminem? Not to mention marrying a super fine Cosplay Otaku Girl, which must be the dream of every geek.
 * Have we mentioned he's also a fan of Quentin Tarantino?
 * His fannishness winds up in his manga, too: one of the major villains, Enel, is visually based on Eminem, and the entirety of Thriller Bark reads like The Nightmare Before Christmas meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Dragon Ball.
 * And it is awesome.
 * Brook is based heavily on Michael Jackson, with fair amounts of Slash (not that kind) mixed in. The character began the training arc by trying to improve MJ's famous 45 degree lean into a 40 degree lean.
 * The Perfectionist: Well, at least what his interviews give away…
 * He won’t allow his assistants draw anything that moves since it may result in an art shift. Check.
 * He writes a movie script, and after that starts from scratch since he isn’t satisfied with it and delays the whole production because of it. The end result? Strong World. Check.
 * Additionally, there are several breaks around the year when a new chapter won't appear in Jump and the explanation is always "The author doing research".
 * Promoted Fanboy
 * The Rival: Sees the Pretty Cure series as this in the anime, since his children love the show more than One Piece. He declares that he'll take down Pretty Cure.
 * Also, to Toriko.
 * Shout-Out: A lot to Dragonball Z, and to soccer.
 * There's even a shout out to his shout-outs: his love of soccer is spoofed in one of the theatrical shorts, which has a character named "Odacchi" whose head sports a soccer ball pattern and is voiced by Oda himself.
 * Shrug of God: Inverted Trope. It doesn't matter what the question is, Oda has an answer. No matter how crazy it seems.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: When asked why a door that was broken in one scene was intact soon after, he claimed a carpenter appeared off-screen and fixed it, and it certainly wasn't a mistake.