Well, I found the awesome alternative to buying mangas... Renting! My library has them! So I rented book 1 of One Piece from the library.

There's one thing that alienated me about the manga when I first started. This, of course, should be obvious... GumGum? Sounds like an idiots babble... Zolo? ****** that. It's not like the name Zoro is copyright or anything. What? Next they'll be making Sanji suck lollipops? I dread. The other thing that bugged me was the 'Read This Way <--- ' garbage written above every single page. You'd think putting 'you're reading the book the wrong way' on the last page would be enough... But I guess American kids are meant to be drolling idiots these days and need to be spoonfed on direction every page to prevent their meager minds from loosing track. And to top all this off, I fear I may have seen typos in the manga... I have yet to double check and honestly don't want to. A paid dubbing group misspelling words? Horror!

But aside from that it's a very spiffy manga. Oda is very cool at making them and I love the art style. The anime is so dead on similar to the manga that I didn't feel like I was reading alien territory by picking up the manga. What's also cool is that there's some info or activity after each chapter. For example, after one of them there's a how to guide on how to make a pirate skull. And at the back there's a #1 and #2 rendition of how Oda first did One Piece and how it evolved before it actually because 'One Piece'.

Best of all. One full chapter devoted to Shanks =D Woo!