Wapol and having to quickly get away from danger, name a more iconic duo. Hello everyone, we’re talking about Volume 26 of One Piece today and I figured I’d start with the cover stories for a change. Most of the time I keep them until the end of a post, or I forget about them. This time around we’re following Wapol around. Remember the gluttonous king that ruled over Drum Kingdom until Blackbeard kicked him out and then Luffy kicked him out a second time? It turns out that he didn’t land in the sea but instead somewhere he would survive. So now he’s eating everything in his path until he gets arrested. I’m sure we’ll see more of him in the next volume, but for now he’s on his way who knows where. We’re also seeing the first examples of Oda’s extremely unrealistic body types for female characters on the cover of this volume. It is what it is, nothing is perfect I suppose.
Blackbeard and his gang just barely missed catching the Straw hats last volume, and although Burgess seems to be angry at the matter, Blackbeard just laughs it off. It’s of no importance, they’ll probably meet again, he says. Meanwhile the crew has made their way to a layer of cloud sea that’s very different from anything they’ve ever seen before. They very quickly learn that this place is completely different from the regular sea. The density of the “water” clouds and the fish that are around them are completely different. I did chuckle at them examining the fish and going into the differences between it and the fish they’re used to, only for it to get sautéed by Sanji in a matter of moments.
Chopper then witnesses a ship and someone standing on the clouds in front of. The ship then immediately gets destroyed and the figure on the clouds charges at the Going Merry. As they’re about to be in big trouble, a savior appears. His name is Ganfor the sky knight and he travels on his trusty unicorn Pierre. As is tradition in One Piece, Pierre definitely has an interesting look, just like many creatures we find in and around the world of One Piece.
There is a lot of exposition in this volume, but let’s go over the important bits real quick.
We learn about dials and wavers early on. Dials are a sort of technology/natural item that allows you to store things and retrieve them. Not like a bag of holding from Dungeons and Dragons, but more like a bottle of water. Except you can store things like wind, light, heat and even force if used in a specific way. Wavers and other ships on this ocean run on them. We also learn that the world of clouds is divided into two layers, with the top layer seemingly being the one where islands are. Speaking of islands, there’s apparently more, Skypiea just being one of them. There’s even other, safer ways to get to a sky island. This does beg the question why it seems to be such an unknown in most of the world. We can write that off to Oda not planning ahead for this, but it also doesn’t show up all that much later on in the story. It gets mentioned from time to time, but I do wonder how relevant it’ll become in the final saga. We also learn some lore that’s more specific to this particular arc. There is a Kami (god) that rules the region and his name is Enel/Eneru. He has four vassals who seem to be very strong, one of us showing a power called Mantra. This will get a little bit spoilery, but this seems like a very clear first draft of the Haki system that is very prevalent in the later parts of this story. I think Oda was testing the system here, so that if it didn’t feel good, he could write it off as something specific to Skypiea and move on.
Conis and Pagaya (who I almost called Papaya) are two inhabitants of Angel Island, which is one part of Sky Island. They help the crew get used to the strange region for a little bit, but quickly get into trouble for doing so. I love how the guys do not blame Conis one bit for betraying them but they instead get angry at her putting herself in danger. They’re good eggs. Either way, they get a first person glance at Enel’s power here when he sends lightning down from the sky. Luffy, Sanji and Usopp make their way into the trial of balls (heh…) and face Priest Satori.
There’s quite a lot of great comedic moments in this volume and we really get to see more of Robin’s dark humor throughout. We also get Zoro pretending to be Tarzan for a little bit because that’s just what you do when swinging on a vine. I don’t make the rules either.
Skypiea felt a bit slow to me the first time I experienced it, since I watched it in the anime. Reading back the manga is making me realize just how much slower of an experience that was. I will still rewatch the entire anime if it ever ends though, I feel like that would be fun. Maybe an episode or two an evening for a couple years? But for now we’re only just getting into sky island. We don’t know much about what’s going on yet, except that there’s a cloud island and a soil island with trees. Enel and his cronies seem to own the island with the big trees and deal with anyone who comes in. The crew is in for some serious danger in this one and I can’t wait to read the next volume. But let me know what you think in the comments down below and as usual, thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 