Holy Sh*t – Upcoming Eiichiro Oda Biography Comic Actually Depicts ‘One Piece’ Creator As ‘The Legend Of Zelda’ Producer Eiji Aonuma
In case their publication of a likewise one-shot white washing Power Rangers creator Haim Saban’s scumbag business tactics left any doubt regarding the low-effort, cash grab nature of Tidalwave Productions’ line of comic book biographies, their upcoming take on One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda actually falls for a classic internet mix-up and depicts the esteemed mangaka as none other than Nintendo producer and current The Legend of Zelda series steward Eiji Aonuma.
As the mastermind behind one of, if not the most globally popular ongoing manga series, it’s should come as no surprise to learn that Oda has gone out of his way to avoid having his public identity exposed to the public, even going so far as to make very, very limited public appearances and choosing to overtly censor his face whenever he makes an on-camera appearance, either with a superimposed image of Luffy or his own personal ‘Fish Head’ avatar:
While this voluntary reclusion has absolutely afforded him some much deserved privacy and peace of mind, it has also resulted in the limited existence of photographs confirming his identity, with the handful that have have found their way to the internet dating back roughly two decades ago to the start of One Piece‘s serialization.
And it was thanks to this lack of recent photographs that in the early days of integrating ‘opening summaries’ into their search results, the ever-confusing nature of early search engine optimization algorithms resisted in Google searches for Oda’s name being forever associated with the aforementioned Aonuma.
An ongoing misfire likely based on the search engine’s trawling of a misinformed fan’s random YouTube upload or blog post, this Oda/Aonuma mix-up has long since become a meme among One Piece fans, its use by anyone claiming authority on the series that they have little, if any familiarity with its actual content.
On that note, please feast your eyes on artist Pablo Martinena’s cover for Tidalwave Productions’ next entry in their signature line of biographical comics, Fame: Eiichiro Oda, as due out next week on December 10th:
For reference, here’s an image of Aonuma, as taken from the first installment of Nintendo’s 2016 retrospective on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
Unless they’re either blind or a through-and-through racist, there’s no way in hell anyone could look at that cover and mistake it for anyone other than Aonuma, or at the very least, not Oda (who, as far as the public knows, doesn’t wear glasses!)
It’s blatantly obvious that in creating this cover, Martinena just went to Google, searched Oda’s name, and began working off either the first or ‘most common’ image result.
All in all, while such use of reference photos is a completely standard practice in the world of art, it’s less common for artists to do such little research into the subjects they’ve been commissioned to portray – at least not if they respect themselves or the work at hand.
And man, if this is the cover – just imagine what the interiors are going to look like.
