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One Piece Manga Tops 490 Million in Circulation Worldwide
posted on by Egan Loo
Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga has surpassed 490 million copies in circulation worldwide as of Monday. That includes over 400 million in Japan and 90 million in at least 57 countries and regions overseas.
The 490 million is for copies in circulation that are not necessarily all sold, and are not copies printed and sold. The number is not a sales statistic.
The manga is commemorating its 100th volume, which will ship on September 3, with several projects. One is the Kibo Discover Project, a collaboration between One Piece's publisher Shueisha, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the interactive production company Bascule. This project will challenge people to spread hope throughout the world by venturing into space. (Kibō or "hope" is the name of a Japanese module of the International Space Station, as well as of a video communication system between ISS and Earth.)
Other commemorative projects include a Where's Waldo crossover, a voice comic of Oda's one-shot manga "Monsters," an interview between the cast members of Luffy and two more ship captains, a reader mail-away offer for figures, the third Shokugeki no Sanji spinoff chapter, a new streaming program on the franchise's YouTube channel, the free (for a limited time) release of the first 90 volumes, and the third One Piece Knowledge King test.
Oda began serializing the One Piece manga in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump manga on July 19, 1997. The 57th volume had a first printing of 3 million copies, a national industry record, in March 2010. The 67th volume had a first printing of 4.05 million copies, the new national industry record, in August 2012.
The manga won the 41st Japan Cartoonist Awards in 2012, and set a Guinness World Record in 2015 for "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author."
As of April 2020, the manga had 390 million copies in circulation in Japan and 80 million copies in circulation in over 42 other countries and territories, for a total of more than 470 million copies in circulation worldwide. Oda published the 1,000th chapter in this year's combined 5th/6th issue of Weekly Shonen Jump magazine on January 4. The manga reached 480 million copies in circulation worldwide as of the release of the 98th volume in early February.
Oda said in an interview last August that he plans to end the story in four or five years.
Source: Mantan Web
