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.