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One Piece Editor Updates on Plans to End Manga in 5 Years

In an interview that Oricon News published on Thursday, One Piece manga editor Takuma Naitō reaffirmed the manga creator Eiichiro Oda's September statement about wanting "to end [the One Piece story] in five years." Natiō acknowledged that just going by what Oda told him about the manga's upcoming developments, Natiō was uncertain about finishing everything in five years. Still, Natiō assured fans that "if Oda says it will be five years, then it will surely end in five years."

Naitō added that, just looking at the rapid developments in the manga's current "Wano Country Arc," he feels that the current pacing will allow for the five-year ending.

Oda revealed during his appearance on Fuji TV's Honma dekka!? program in January that the ending of the manga is "near" and that the manga will have "just over 100 volumes." Oda noted that he had thought about the manga's ending since he was still in college. In addition, the show's host Sanma Akashiya also asked Oda what would happen if a fan managed to guess the same ending that Oda is writing. Oda replied that he would change the ending. [After Oda's January statement, OnePiece.com and V Jump columnist Greg Werner cautioned fans against equating Oda's estimates of the story's progress to precise timeframes.]

Oda said in an interview in July 2016 that he had finished around 65% of the manga.

While he was still in high school, Oda was a runner-up for the Tezuka Award for new creators from Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1992. He began serializing the One Piece manga in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump manga on July 19, 1997. The manga will have more than 460 million copies in print worldwide when the 95th volume ships on December 28. That total includes 390 million copies in print in Japan, and 70 million copies in print outside of Japan across 42 territories. 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."

Shueisha will publish the manga's 95th volume in Japan on December 28. Viz Media released the 92nd volume in English on November 2.

Source: Oricon News via @kiirobon