Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours (Viz) is one of those comics that apply grimly serious coats of paint to popular fantasy architecture. In this case, it’s about a group of kids climbing into a giant robot to save the world. The twist is that the kids are realistic, or “realistic,” in that some of them are understandably frightened or emotionally disturbed or just plain awful instead of sunny and dedicated. There’s also some play with what would actually happen if giant robots battled in a populated area.

It’s a competent comic, but it isn’t particularly interesting to me. I’m not a fan of un-deconstructed giant-robot stories in the first place, and I’ve never yearned to see anyone expose their seedy underbellies. And it isn’t as though there’s a shortage of bleak versions of kid-friendly concepts, so I can pick and choose from the best of them. (Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, also from Viz, is a great example. Come to think of it, there’s some great giant-robot nonsense in Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys which treats the concept with the degree of seriousness I feel like it deserves, which is just about none at all.)

I’d read the first few chapters of Bokurano on Viz’s SigIKKI site, but it didn’t hold my attention in the way that site’s weirder, more imaginative series have. I thought it might read better in a larger chunk, but I found myself even less attentive. You can’t win them all.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. You can read a bunch of free chapters of Bokurano: Ours here.)

The Reverse Thieves recently podcast their thoughts on why Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (originally published by Shueisha and released in English by Viz) isn’t the mega-hit here that it is in Japan. (That’s a volume sold every 1.6 seconds, basically.) As a relatively recent convert to the Cult of the Straw Hats, I’ve pondered this question, and I certainly enjoyed hearing the Thieves speculate. I enjoyed listening to them geek out over the title’s many glories even more, since I’m increasingly given to doing the exact same thing.

One observation that really caught my ear was about Oda’s world building and his willingness to plant tiny, seemingly irrelevant narrative seeds that come to full flower later, sometimes much later. Natsuki Takaya did this all the time in Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), turning seemingly oblique observations and sideways glances from volume two into searing heartbreak in, say, volume nine. It’s quite a skill, that kind of callback work, and it displays a great deal of confidence on the part of the creator that they’ll be able to tell their story according to plan.

That’s a nice element of Oda’s work, but what really make the book addictive are the moments when action, comedy and drama come together perfectly. It’s amazing to see Oda mix heartbreaking bits of character development in with a wild, sprawling brawl packed with over-the-top action and bizarre opponents. It’s what pushes One Piece from the level of very good shônen fantasy to great manga in general.

One of my side obsessions is finding the spot where that combination first really clicked. It doesn’t happen in volumes four through six, collected here. One Piece is still just very good, and Oda is kind of vamping as he assembles his core crew and introduces the kinds of adventures they’ll be having for the foreseeable future.

In this case, it’s settling the affairs of poor old Usopp, the sharpshooter and compulsive liar who’s trying to protect his seaside village from the byzantine schemes of Captain Kuro and Kuro’s bizarre henchmen. These chapters reinforce Oda’s ability to craft antagonists who are freaky and amusing and genuinely menacing at the same time. They also reinforce some of Luffy’s defining qualities, specifically his utter confidence even when he’s getting his rubber butt handed to him.

That settled, the Straw Hats then sail on to a floating restaurant staffed by brawl-happy former pirates and led by a chef with a peg leg and a moustache that’s practically a character in its own right. These chapters highlight Oda’s way with absurd scenarios and interesting settings. They also introduce us to Sanji, the assistant chef with the uzumaki eyebrows and the high-kicking fighting style. Sanji loves the ladies in that ineffectual way of supporting characters in shônen adventure stories, and he loves to feed people. He’s foul-mouthed but oddly dapper, and… wait for it… he has a dream.

Precisely what that dream is will have to wait for the next omnibus. Also on deck for that collection is the secret ingredient to One Piece’s greatness: the crushingly sad character flashback. But there is plenty to enjoy in the meantime. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the sprawling fight sequences are really, really good. I don’t have a whole lot of patience for incomprehensible battle techniques and drawn-out struggles, and Oda has yet to fail on those fronts. All of his combatants have specialties, but they always make sense, and there’s more than enough humor and surprise in these knock-down drag-outs to maintain my interest.

But oh, those crushingly sad character flashbacks… you don’t even know, but by volume nine, you will.

I don’t know quite why this has happened, or exactly when, but I’ve got an ugly One Piece monkey on my back. Viz sent me some recent volumes from its ramped-up release schedule, and I liked them well enough and, critically, wanted to know what happened next. That desire to know the outcome has gotten steadily worse as I’ve picked up subsequent volumes, and Viz’s omnibus editions of the early volumes have me reading One Piece on two tracks, current and vintage. As a manifestation of this awful addiction (and seriously, I can usually be found wandering around my house with some random volume in hand like a security blanket), I thought I’d revisit an old review of the first two volumes with updated, junkie thoughts in italics and some commentary on the third volume afterwards.

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The “young man with a dream” story is as common to manga as dead girlfriends are to super-hero comics. [I’ve got to apologize for the manga-spandex comparisons that crop up so often in these early reviews. They really don’t serve either kind of comic, but they reflect my head space at the time.] These callow lads want to be sports heroes, great chefs, and master gamesmen. There’s a surprising amount of variety within the genre, and the level of drive the protagonists display can range from amiably low-key to full-out obsessive. But what happens when the dream in question is kind of stupid?

In the case of Shonen Jump’s One Piece, you get a daft and surprisingly heartwarming comedy that’s probably a lot smarter than it seems.

Monkey D. Luffy, the dreamer in this instance, wants to be King of the Pirates. There’s some question as to whether he actually knows what pirates do. Luffy grew up in a seaside village that provided refuge for a rather unusual pirate crew, led by good-hearted Captain Shanks. Since the pirates used Luffy’s home as a hideout instead of a target, the boy never saw the darker aspects of piracy. From his perspective, pirates are good-natured rogues, living lives of adventure on the high seas and drunken fellowship on dry land. [Luffy’s vague grasp of the criminality of the pirate’s life seems largely intact.]

Shanks and company discourage Luffy’s attempts to join their crew. (Did I mention Luffy can’t swim?) He’s impervious to discouragement, though. By the time the pirates save Luffy and his town from a group of mountain bandits, the boy is hopelessly hooked on piracy as a career choice.

Luffy isn’t much of a long-term thinker, though. By the time he sets off in a sad little tub, he has no crew and only a vague notion of what he’ll do next. And he still can’t swim. As a child, he ate a strange fruit that turned his entire body to rubber. While that has its uses, buoyancy isn’t one of them. [This fruit is part of a horticultural subset known as “devil fruits” that give their eaters amazing and bizarre powers but rob them of the ability to swim a stroke.]

So Luffy sails off to assemble a crew and pursue his goal, armed only with a beloved straw hat (a gift from Shanks), a rubber body (surprisingly effective for clobbering), and impenetrable optimism (maybe it’s made of rubber, too). In short order, he runs afoul of pirates a bit more representative of the lifestyle. They pillage and murder, often taking sadistic pleasure in the fear they inspire. It’s hard to see how Luffy will fit in with this ilk. [The short answer is that he won’t. Luffy doesn’t want to be a pirate as pirates are; he wants to be a pirate as he has come to conceive them – adventurers who see amazing places and do legendary things, basking in the camaraderie of the crew.]

Happily, he doesn’t modify his full-speed-ahead tactics a bit. Luffy clearly has his own vision of what piracy is, and he’s blissfully dismissive of any counter-examples. His oblivious determination is also reflected in his attempts at crew recruitment. First up is [Roronoa] Zoro, a noted bounty hunter of pirates who wants to become the world’s greatest swordsman. Second is Nami, a clever thief who preys on pirates and wants to score enough loot to buy a village. Both take an understandably dim view of Luffy’s profession, but the dork who would be King is undeterred.

In the course of the first two volumes, Luffy bounces through a range of misadventures. He finds Zoro in a town under the thumb of the sadistic Captain Morgan, befriending and inspiring Koby, a would-be navy officer, in the process. Next, he hooks up with crafty Nami in a town under siege by evil pirate Buggy the Clown. There’s peril aplenty, with Morgan, Buggy, and their colorful henchmen doing their best to bring Luffy’s quest to a lethally premature end.

But there’s plenty to laugh at, too. While creator Eiichiro Oda does some exceptional physical comedy and builds some nice set pieces, the most satisfying laughs come from reversal of expectations. Koby, Zoro, and Nami all do their level best to explain to Luffy what pirates are really like, generally right before Luffy does something courageous and generous. He’s a tough kid to dislike, and it’s hard not to root for him. Dreams of piracy aside, he doesn’t sink to other pirates’ level, and he doesn’t let their brutality disillusion him. [Seriously, Luffy might be congenitally immune to disillusionment.]

Oda’s visuals are a cartoony treat that remind me a lot of Todd Nauck of Young Justice. He does terrific character design, particularly on scurvy antagonists like Morgan and Buggy. Oda has also come up with some creative renderings of Luffy’s rubbery frame, but he saves them up for maximum impact and comedy. He strikes a very nice balance of actual brutality (Luffy’s kinder, gentler approach to piracy wouldn’t have any impact if there wasn’t a contrasting reality) and highly stylized antics.

Is One Piece a great manga? Not really, but I don’t think it aims to be. It seems more satisfied to be creative genre entertainment. What raises it above its legion of “young man with a dream” peers are the subtle ways it subverts its own genre. In the final analysis, it offers good pirate fun, solidly crafted and sneakily smart. [This is very clearly wrong, maybe not in terms of Oda’s aims, but certainly in terms of One Piece’s greatness. It has that essential, aforementioned quality that defines great adventure comics – making the reader want to know what happens next because the characters are so likeable and the plots are so engaging. And it can be extraordinarily moving, not so much early on when Oda is setting up his game board, but certainly later.]

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The third volume is most noteworthy for the introduction of Usopp who is, in Whedon-esque terms, “the Zeppo” of One Piece. He’s not exceptional like his cast mates, and his primary skills seem to be in spinning tall tales and taking punishment. (He’s also pretty good with a slingshot. I have no idea if this is meant to reflect a “David in a world of Goliaths” metaphor, but I’ll throw that out there.) His primary function, though, is essential. He’s the (relatively) normal guy, out of his depth but along for the ride because he believes in his friends and cherishes their thrilling adventures, even though those adventures frequently scare him to death. Usopp is Luffy’s opposite in a lot of ways. Luffy is a bulldozer of certainty, while Usopp is characterized by much more realistic doubt, mostly that the Straw Hats will survive their latest mishap. But Usopp keeps trying to contribute and to keep up with the larger-than-life figures around him, and he’s clearly positioned for that thankless role, “the heart of the team.”

A frequent synonym for “the heart of the team” is “the punching bag,” and Oda seems to be dedicated to a certain consistency in portraying just how Usopp would fare against the Straw Hats’ adversaries. It’s become almost impossible for me to think of Usopp without subconsciously inserting “poor old” in front of his name, but he’s a key ingredient to the series. The central message of One Piece is that everyone should be able to pursue their dreams, even if those dreams are rather beyond the scope of one’s abilities. And that’s why we have friends, to help us achieve those dreams and accept our help in return.

Stan Lee created the template for a lot of comics I loved for a very long time. Beyond that, he was a very prominent figure in those comics, at least in terms of the tone that Marvel put forward. He was the cheesy ringmaster in the text pieces, the company’s head cheerleader. Even when I was six, he never seemed as young to me as he seemed to feel, but there was a weird charm to that. So what if he was using made-up lingo that would seem out of date and awkward coming out of the mouths of people 20 years younger? He didn’t convey any cynicism to me, though whether that was because my radar for such things hadn’t yet developed, I can’t say.

He still doesn’t really convey any cynicism to me, though his bombast does strike me as even more awkward now than it did then. (It’s kind of like seeing snippets of Hef with a trio of girlfriends a quarter of his age, though it’s nowhere near as creepy.) Time hasn’t really seemed to pass for Lee, at least in terms of his enthusiasm for trying new things. He’s continually busy, tinkering around with DC’s characters in those “Just Imagine” books a few years ago, hosting a reality show, animating Pamela Anderson, and so on. So it’s unsurprising that he would eventually get around to manga.

The result is Ultimo (Viz). Lee provided the concept, and the story and art were executed by Hiroyuki (Shaman King) Takei, with inking support from Daigo and painting duties executed by Bob. It’s serialized in Viz’s Shonen Jump over here and as Karakuridôji Ultimo in Shueisha’s Jump SQ in Japan. That kind of exposure indicates that it clearly isn’t just a vanity project or a courtesy to a comic-book legend. It’s a serious commercial effort by all concerned.

And Lee is even more present in the narrative as he was in those old Marvel Comics. He provides the introduction. There’s a photo of him in a yukata. He even inspires a character, Dunstan, who sets the whole plot in motion. And still, somehow, none of this is creepy, except for possibly an end-note interview where Lee urges readers to “buy as many copies of Ultimo as [they] possibly can.” Keep your collector’s speculative mentality to yourself.

I’m fond of Lee, I really am, and nothing here changes that. He’s got the same huckster sense of fun with just enough sincerity underneath. But fondness aside, part of me was hoping that Ultimo would be a train wreck. This isn’t because I wish ill to anyone involved, but because the combination of Lee and manga enticingly suggests a lot of ways things could go wrong. (I think every generation deserves its Broadway musical version of Carrie, don’t you?)

Sadly, Ultimo is competent, mildly odd action shônen about fighting robots. Given Takei’s participation, it would have been competent and mildly odd without Lee’s participation. In my experience with Takei’s work, he’s given to unsettling character designs that straddle the line between cute and creepy, and that’s in evidence here. Unfortunately, it’s the most interesting aspect of the book.

Anyway, here’s the plot: a long time ago, Dunstan decides to create powerful robotic dolls that would answer the eternal question: “Who’d win? Good or evil?” The dolls re-emerge in the present day and align themselves with reincarnated versions of the people they knew back in the feudal era. They fight. And we seem to be set to meet a bunch of other robotic dolls that personify a variety of gradations of good and evil. That’s about it, aside from some teen-angst garnish about our hero, Yamato.

The battle between good and evil is ubiquitous in action shônen, and the interest comes from the ways the creators dress it up. Stripping the concept down to an action-figure version doesn’t doing anything to enhance the core idea. Yamato’s woes are kind of generic, though I always feel at least a little bit sympathetic for reincarnated characters of a certain type. The poor bastards never stood a chance, what with the centuries-old destinies to replay and other people’s unfinished business.

As I noted, Takei’s character designs bring the most to the table in terms of the actual comic. He doesn’t seem inclined to do straight-up cool, throwing in some kind of unsavory note to each aspect, and his robotic dolls are very much in that vein. They’re delicate and monstrous at the same time, and the unnerving experience of looking at them helps compensate for the fact that they don’t really have much in the way of personality.

Basically, my problems with Ultimo are my problems with generic action shônen. I can recognize the competence of its execution without being particularly interested in the characters or outcomes. Aside from the novelty of watching Lee interface with manga outside the narrative is the best reason to read the book, and that doesn’t add up to much.

(This review is based on a review copy provided by the publisher.)

I hadn’t realized that Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (Viz) was popular enough here to get the Naruto Nation treatment. I know it’s huge in Japan, but I thought it was one of those books that sells very respectably if not spectacularly. (Favorite bookstore memory: seeing two stylish exchange students from the local university totally geek out when they saw One Piece on the shelf.) But Viz is releasing a whole bunch of volumes on a very accelerated schedule, and it’s been publishing omnibus editions of the early installments. New volumes have also been cropping up in the manga section of the New York Times Graphic Book Best Seller List, though pirates don’t seem to have quite the commercial force of ninjas or vampires or James Patterson.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I read a handful of early volumes of the manga and enjoyed them well enough, but not quite enough to keep up. I don’t have quite the attention span for shônen that I do for some other categories. But the publisher recently sent me review copies of volumes 29, 30 and 31, which picks up roughly in the early middle of an arc about a mysterious chain of islands that floats up in the clouds, and it seemed like a good opportunity to see what’s up with the crew.

The Straw Hats, the pirates who form the comic’s core cast, are scattered throughout this floating island along with a dauntingly large number of guest characters representing different island factions. It’s not impossible to figure out what’s going on, but if you’re going to sample One Piece, I can’t recommend the 29th volume as your starting point. (I think the “Skypiea” arc starts in the 24th volume.) There’s an evil god who’s pitting all of these factions against each other, and our dimwitted hero, stretchable pirate Luffy, is on the path to becoming sufficiently annoyed to knock said god off of his perch.

That moment is likely to be very, very satisfying. Oda has that key shônen skill set of investing action with whimsy and just enough import to keep things lively, and Luffy’s primary function, at least as I see it, is to gradually reach that point where he concludes that something (definitely energetic, possibly ludicrous) must be done to set things right. Until that moment, we get lots of characters fighting each other in imaginative, slightly puzzling ways, escaping perils of varying degrees of menace and lunacy, or realizing just how out of their depth they actually are. (Luffy is immune to concerns of depth, which is why he’s the lead.)

What makes me eager to see the conclusion is the fact that Oda takes a break from the floating-islands mayhem to take readers back to where everything started, centuries before Luffy was born, before he ever considered pillaging as a life calling. (Oh, and if you’re leery of cheering for a bunch of criminals, Luffy’s concept of piracy is really mild.) In the flashback, a botanical explorer finds one of the islands that will later take to the air and tries to befriend its imperiled residents. It’s shônen in miniature, with rivals becoming friends, skills displayed and shared, and brave promises of loyalty made, but it’s also moving and tragic. It gives heft to the main event, and it shows how focused and precise Oda can be as a storyteller. Beyond the fact that it works in the larger context, it’s nice to see something linear and restrained in the midst of the mad jumble.

In other developments, there are two Straw Hats who are new to me. One is a tiny reindeer named Chopper who serves as the crew’s doctor and seems given to panic. He spends most of these volumes unconscious, which is unfortunate, because what sensible person doesn’t want to know more about a tiny, panicky doctor who’s also a reindeer? The other is a taciturn archeologist named Nico Robin who can make arms grow anywhere and then control them. Given that most of her crewmates are amusingly hyperactive dingbats, her relatively serene, contemplative presence is very welcome.