A boy in a straw hat eats a strange fruit, gives up swimming for good, and gains a body that stretches like rubber. Monkey D. Luffy decides this qualifies him to become King of the Pirates, so he rows out alone to look for the treasure called the One Piece.

Eiichiro Oda has drawn that voyage every week in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump since July 1997, and the collected volumes stand at 114. Luffy gathers the Straw Hats one island at a time: Zoro the swordsman, Nami the navigator, Usopp the liar, Sanji the cook, each with a reason to leave home. Oda crowds his pages on purpose, packing in background jokes, ridiculous ship designs and faces you will meet again two hundred chapters later. His figures run to long limbs and wild silhouettes, closer to newspaper cartooning than to the clean house style of most action manga.

The tone swings hard, and Oda means it to. A chapter plays slapstick for ten pages, hands a character a childhood worth crying over, then returns to the joke without apology. Early volumes work as self-contained island stories, so you can test the water cheaply before the arcs start running long. Anyone who wants something tidy and finished should look elsewhere. Read it for a world that keeps widening, a cast in the hundreds, and a captain whose plan never gets more complicated than sailing forward.