‘One Piece’ Celebrates Live-Action Netflix Series’ Premiere By Making First 12 Volumes Available To Read Free-Of-Charge
Good news for all incoming One Piece fans interested in checking out the source material after enjoying Netflix’s live-action adaptation – In honor of the series’ premiere, the original manga’s publisher Shueisha has officially made the first twelve volumes of Eiichiro Oda’s seminal manga available to read free-of-charge.
Courtesy of the newly-minted and aptly-titled website Read Me! ONE PIECE!, audiences can dive into the titular series not just for free, but also without any need to register for any sort of account.
Collecting the first 108 chapters of Luffy’s quest to become Pirate King, these volumes recount such tales as the aforementioned captain’s departure from his home town, his first meeting with the first four members of his Straw Hat crew, and their subsequent battle with the human-shark hybrid Arlong Pirates.
Further, as of writing, it does not appear that that Shueisha has put any sort of time-limit on these volumes’ availability. In other words, audiences can now peruse the original depictions of the events upon which the Netflix adaptation’ based its first season at their own leisure.
Notably, this generous offering has been made available across 22 different languages – English, Spanish, Taiwanese Mandarin, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Thai, Serbian, Russian, Portuguese, Brazillian Portuguese, Polish, Norweigan, South Korean, Italian, Indonesian, French, Finnish (Suomalainen), Mexican Spanish, Argentinian Spanish, and German – thus allowing for newcomers across the globe to dive into the Straw Hats’ first adventures.
However, it should be noted that some foreign language releases are currently being added to the service, and as such not all 108 chapters may yet be available in one’s respective tongue.
And should readers find themselves wanting to make further progress on the road to the series’ most recent and 110th volume, each chapter on the Read Me! ONE PIECE! site opens with a direct link to their local publisher’s series-specific storefront, thus allowing them to easily hop right back onto the deck of the Going Merry.
In a shocking turn of events, audiences who do happen to make their way through all 12 volumes will be shocked to find that the live-action series deviates little from its source material.
Outside of a few shuffling of events in order to help translate the manga’s storytelling to that of the television medium, as well as the addition of a new fight between Zoro and Mr. 7, Oda’s original One Piece series provides an almost exact ‘storyboard’ for Netflix’s take on it.
Of course, this result would likely not have been possible had Oda himself not insisted on being involved with every step of the live-action series’ production.
“Various manga had been made into live action, but there was a history of failure; no one in Japan could name a successful example,” recalled the manga during a recent interview with The New York Times. “Would fans of One Piece — and viewers who don’t know the manga — accept it? Perhaps it was time to search for the answer.”
“Thankfully, Netflix agreed that they wouldn’t go out with the show until I agreed it was satisfactory,” he then noted. “I read the scripts, gave notes and acted as a guard dog to ensure the material was being adapted in the correct way.”
Netflix’s Oda-supervised, live-action take on One Piece is now available for streaming.