I don't have any sense that we're actually close to the end of One Piece, but the manga that I want to highlight this week is Mission Yozakura Family, and I think we might be getting close to the end of that.
And I want to hedge, always, because I predicted in the first episode of this Jump OTTACK! podcast that we might be getting close to the end of Ultimate Exorcist Kyoshi, and we are definitely not near the end of Ultimate Exorcist Kyoshi.
If anything, I feel like that series got extended, essentially. Like, maybe the author was thinking about having to wrap it up if it wasn't going well, and then the first volume sold or something, so now he's able to continue it.
But that one is queued and still running, so everything with a grain of salt.
However, if it's not the end of the whole show—excuse me, of the whole manga—Mission Yozakura Family is definitely approaching the end of its current arc.
I guess I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll be kind of cryptic about it, but whether the whole series is about to be over, and whether it's going to end on a high note or an emotional note, or is it going to be a happy ending? Is it going to be a partially happy ending? Is it going to be a not-super-happy ending?
I don't know. And maybe it won't be over at all. But not that I'm rooting for it to be over, because I like it, and I wouldn't mind it continuing to run, but it's also going to feel kind of weird if this is not the final arc.
So we'll see where that goes, but I would be kind of happy with any of the possible endings, although I think picking not the most predictable happy ending would be a more interesting choice for the series.
At the same time, it has an anime as well, which we haven't done an episode about. I don't know. Maybe there's room for it to keep going, and if so, that's cool. And if it's over, that's also maybe kind of cool.
But I think the story pacing of the manga so far makes me think this is something that could be successfully adapted. So we'll have to like wait and see on that. But those are the series I wanted to shout out is doing especially well this week. And I guess looking back very briefly at some of the others, Kagura Bachi didn't go full Game of Thrones. Like they, you know, they kind of pulled out like a little bit of a twist in this week's chapter.
And so I don't know, killing your main character is like a gutsy move in any format, but so it's not hugely surprising that, you know, spoiler alert, that's not what happened. It's still like a big twist in the story and I still think it's great, but they could have gone even harder and they like chose not to. And like, yeah, right. I get it. Undead Unlock still just awesome. And Roboco still very funny. This week's Roboco actually starts off like it's going to be a mystery.
And has like a lot of classic mystery components, but you get to the end of the chapter and all of the characters are like, yeah, like we knew who the culprit was from the very beginning, which is funny because the reader also feels that way. Like from the beginning of the chapter, you're like, okay, it's like obvious where this is going. And it somehow still manages to be funny, even though it's obvious. And part of the funniness of it is that the other characters in the manga are also like, yeah, it was not really actually that hard.
It's not really actually that hard to know what was going on. So it's just like a very, it's like a good meta joke still. And Roboco rocks. I think that's where I'll like cut it for, for our look back. And just because I've given a shout out to SIDCRAFT in every episode so far, SIDCRAFT this week is not a mystery at all, but rather the introduction of another new character, giving the series even more of a little bit of like a one main guy and all the girls are in love with him kind of a vibe.
So I don't know. So it took, it took yet another tack this time around. It wasn't a mystery, like really romance was more in a somehow. So some big Detective Conan vibes in this one.
All right. I had one other thought while I was reading One Piece this week, and that was this. Manga as an art form, particularly this type of manga, where it comes out weekly in a serialized magazine is actually like, stay with me on this, Charles Dickens. Because Charles Dickens, famous British author who wrote A Christmas Carol, which is a story I think about a lot every year at the holidays, and which I have repeatedly read aloud cover to cover.
With my family, he also wrote much longer novels like Christmas Carol is the equivalent of a one shot, right? He just released it like one go, like, boom, here it is.
But he wrote a lot of novels that were serialized where they would come out monthly, and you would only read a part of the novel at a time. And it would run for like, you know, years or a year. And he also wrote weeklies where parts of the novel came out every week. And so Great Expectations, which is one of his most famous works was a weekly serialization.
I don't think he wrote anything that ran as long as One Piece. But I tried to picture if One Piece were a novel, how long would it be? And some guy did take, and this was like last year or two years ago or something, took all the chapters of One Piece, all the pages of One Piece and put them into a book. And it's so big, you can't open the book. Like the book's spine is so large that it's not possible to actually read the pages.
But it just struck me as, you know, as interesting to think of Charles Dickens as the first weekly mangaka.
Did he draw any pictures?
No, of course not. He just wrote literature. But the idea of, you know, he popularized the serialization model for literature, and manga follows that these days. And I don't know, I just thought that was kind of cool to be like, to have this moment of reflection, maybe in the shower or something where I was like, Oh my god, Oda Ichiro is Charles Dickens.
Yes. Okay, whatever. It's not that similar. But, you know, it's a piece of mamichishiki, like a little trivia fact that Charles Dickens is one of the first popular serialization authors. And although we don't think of literature very often as like a serialization thing anymore, I can't tell you any modern novels that have been serialized that way. It's an art form that continues with things like Shonen Jump and the Shonen Jump app.
So thanks, Charles Dickens, for giving us this model of reading work.