One Piece fans are always dying to tell you, a person who’s yet to read creator Eiichiro Oda’s 25-year-old seafaring epic, that the manga is a work of art. Now that sentiment has become reality in the most ridiculous way possible: An artist has compiled all the 21,450 pages of One Piece that currently exist into a single, massive “book.” A one piece of One Piece, if you will. I’m not apologizing.
The artwork, appropriately titled OnePiece, is by Ilan Manouach, a French artist who specialises in creating pieces on post-digital comics. My takeaway from Manouach’s website is that the purpose behind OnePiece is to dramatically illustrate how fast capitalism dictates production needs to be to satiate the audience by compiling the entire epic into a single massive, imposing, physical “book.” Prior to his OnePiece art, Manouach was known for the Shapereader, a touchable, visual storytelling system for folks with visual disabilities.
Kotaku reached out to Manouach for comment.
Read More: I Just Read 1,025 Chapters Of One Piece, And It’s A Damn Masterpiece
Before you ask: No, the long-boi book is practically impossible to lay on a table and read without a high probability of tearing pages or otherwise damaging its structural integrity. According to a Google translation from Manouach’s website, “ONEPIECE can only be contemplated as a materialization of digital comics’ very own media-saturated digital ecosystem. ONEPIECE exists only as an object of pure speculation.”
In layman’s terms, OnePiece is something to look at as you mull over the supply and demand rates of manga from online digital storefronts like VIZ Media. Given the mega-book’s colorfully illustrated spine and cover, reminiscent of the collage featured on the spine of Dragon Ball Z’s manga volumes, OnePiece would make for a great end-piece or, let’s be honest, an entire shelf of your bookshelf to display at your next weeb gathering.
Speaking of display, this hoss of an artwork measures 12 x 18.5 x 80 centimeters (or 4.7″ x 7.2″ x 31″ for the Ameri-brained) and weighs 17 kilograms (38 pounds). If worse comes to worst and you find yourself on the wrong end of a burglary, you could either bludgeon the would-be criminal with OnePiece or throw it into their arms and hit em with the ‘ol gomu gomu gatling.
Read More: One Piece ‘Super Fan’ Streamed Himself Reading All 1,051 Chapters In 106 Hours
If you’re serious about stunting on your fellow weebs by displaying Manouach’s art piece in your home, I hate to break it to you but while I was writing this it sold out from JBE Books, the French publisher behind the art project..Unless you had mastery of Supreme King Haki, you stood no chance in getting ahead of other die-hard fans to procure this curiosity. On the bright side, you didn’t have to scrounge up a boat-load of berries, because OnePiece costs 1900€ (roughly $1,924.17 USD ($2,671)) not including shipping. Some might say the real OnePiece wasn’t actually purchasing it, but the failure in copping it.
According to French news site Actualitte, OnePiece was on display for public viewing at the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville, Paris, France, during the Multiple Art Days fair over the weekend. While OnePiece, as it stands, is an impressive piece of artwork to look at and pontificate over, it goes without saying that it is incomplete, seeing as how it only covers the current volumes of the manga (we’re at 98 currently), with more to come. Oda is saying his manga is in its “final stages,” so perhaps sooner than later Manouach can create a OnePiece 2 to bookend the original. Hopefully someday you too can have a giant, unreadable compendium of One Piece to call your own.
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