One Piece manga breaks Guinness World Record

The One Piece manga, which inspired the popular anime and the upcoming live-action Netflix series, has just set a new Guinness World Record.

It was announced yesterday that Eiichiro Oda’s ground-breaking shonen manga has now surpassed 500 million copies published worldwide. This feat was reached during the release of the manga’s 103rd volume, which was also yesterday.

This accomplishment isn’t just impressive, it’s record-breaking. One Piece has now broken the record for “the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author.”

The 24-year-old ongoing manga, which follows the sea-sailing adventures of the stretchy superpowered Monkey D. Luffy as he attempts to become the Pirate King, has always been a popular series, and this record serves to showcase that.

One Piece breaks a Guinness World Record – a record that One Piece originally set

Turns out that this record that One Piece has just broken was actually a record set by… One Piece as well.

The manga originally set a Guinness World Record in June 2015 for having 320,866,000 copies worldwide as of December 2014. Now – or rather, as of July 2021 – the manga had 490 million copies in circulation worldwide, and the number has kept growing.

416,566,000 of these manga copies are in Japan, with 100 million copies circulating in 60 countries worldwide, and Viz Media publishing copies in North America. These figures include both print and digital copies.

The manga, which began serializing in 1997, is currently completing its Wano Country arc after Oda took a month’s break in June. Weekly Shonen Jump had teased in August 2020 that One Piece was “headed toward the upcoming final saga,” so fans can expect some action-packed upcoming chapters.

The manga’s adapted anime is still going strong, with an animated film, One Piece Film: Red, opening this week, and a live-action series in production with Netflix, which you can read more about here.