French One Piece fans can now enjoy a massive mural of all of their favorite characters.
The new mural was put up to celebrate te release of One Piece's 101st collected volume in the region. The imposing piece of artwork presents many of the characters from the raid on Onigashima, including fan-favorites such as Trafalgar D. Water Law, Kaidou's rebellious offspring Yamato, and of course, series protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, in a larger-than-life scale. The mural is now available for viewing at the Paris' Gare Montparnasse, which is one of the six major railway terminals in the city. Images of the mural were shared online by French manga and anime news outlet Team Manga.
The battle at Onigashima is one of the major events of the Wano Country arc, which sees the Straw Hat Pirates forming an alliance with several other major pirate crews to take down the tryannical Kaidou and his Beast Pirates. The eventful and long-running arc began in Chapter 909, which was published in 2018, and is still on-going. The anime adaptation of the arc began in 2019 and has continued through the series' most recent critically acclaimed episode, which explained the backstory of Yamato and her history with Ace.
One Piece is incredibly popular in France. In 2021 alone, the long-running pirate epic managed to sell a whopping 5.6 million copies in the region. Last year, series creator Eiichiro Oda gifted the recently re-elected French President Emmanuel Macron a special illustration of Luffy and the other Straw Hat Pirates, and thanked his French fans for making the series such a success. Macron responded by tweeting out a message of thanks to Oda in both French and Japanese.
One Piece was created by Eiichiro Oda and first set sail in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jumpin 1998. In the the almost quarter-century since its debut, the adventures of the Straw Hat Pirates have become the best-selling manga series of all time by a wide margin, with approximately half-a-billion copies in circulation around the world. The entire anime series is available for streaming on Crunchyroll, while select seasons and several of the franchise's animated features are available for streaming on Netflix.
In addition to the on-going manga, fans of the series can also look forward to the upcoming release of the series' 15th movie, One Piece Film: Red, which will premiere in Japan this August. A live-action adaptation is currently being filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, and is being produced by Netflix and Tomorrow Pictures, the studio behind the short-lived Cowboy Bebop reboot. Oda is serving as the producer on both projects.