Dragon Ball Z paved the way for popular shounen mangas like One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, My Hero Academia, Good Luck Girl, Gintama, and many more.
It is a very well-known fact, One Piece author, Eiichiro Oda, has been a fan of Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, and it reflects in his work. There have been various moments when fans got One Piece-Dragon Ball Z crossovers. Cross Epoch is an example where Oda and Toriyama collaborated on a story featuring One Piece and Dragon Ball Z characters.
One Piece Author Eiichiro Oda Reacts On Dragon Ball Ending
In the WSJ #34 interview with Gosho Aoyama, Oda discussed how the end of Dragon Ball Z impacted his One Piece.
I started ‘One Piece”s serialisation in 1997, 2 years before that, ‘Dragon Ball’ ended.To us that was a shock and there was a time when the newbies started a fight for ‘Dragon Balls’s’ slot saying that ‘I want that slot!’. Then for 2 years it was a repetition of being destroyed by being compared to ‘Dragon Ball’ and I’ve finally survived.
Dragon Ball has consistently been the top ranker. After Dragon Ball ended, ‘Detective Conan’ and ‘Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo’ grabbed the top two spots, and ‘Detective Conan’ was always the winner.
“A while after ‘Dragon Ball’ ended, in the world of the shounen manga ‘Detective Conan’ and ‘Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo’ were the 2 top. ‘Detective Conan’ was always winning.”
The One Piece author was ‘frustrated’ at some time during his early career, especially when Eiichiro Oda’s drawings were already considered “weird,” and there were rumors of Shonen Jump suffering after losing two of its best mangas of all time.
“At that time, ‘Dragon Ball’ and ‘Slam Dunk’ ended and there was a period where people thought the Jump was in problems. Jump’s cover was published in the issue where my serialization started and at the side of ‘One Piece”s drawing there was written “Magazine surpasses Jump”. It wasn’t my responsibility at all (laughs) but I remember I thought it was really frustrating.”
From being considered the “weird” drawing of all time to become the best seller, setting a Guinness World Record for “the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author,” it is incredible to see how our favorite author has come a long way to create one of the most popular shounen mangas of all time.
Source: @DbsHype, @Orojapan1
