As 2021 rolled in, the world of manga witnessed the 1000th chapter of One Piece. Yes, you read that right: One Thousandth chapter. More than 2 decades worth of weekly anticipation, sprinkled with nearly 3 years worth of (un)expected breaks by Eiichiro Oda, rolled into 1 giant realization that I’m not going to see the end of this marvellous adventure. But as people say, it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. To those people, I say, hell with you all. Because you have definitely not read One Piece.
Anyway, that is all I want to say for now. I feel this year will be big for mangas and we will talk about them once in a while as this year unfurls. Wishing Totan Kobako a complete recovery from his hand injuries and hoping this year finally sees his new work published. Meanwhile, I hope those lovely people who translated Sketchbook in the past can restart scanlating the rest of the chapters covering the last 3½ volumes. If everything else fails, I guess Google Lens will have to do the job. It’s a sad state of the world considering that “real-time translation” was one of the most promising features of the “MS Translator” app on Windows Phone 8/Mobile 10, which never materialized for Japanese in the 5 or so years of the OS’s existence/relevance.
