Piece Of The Action

ACTORS IÑAKI GODOY AND EMILY RUDD TALK ABOUT STARRING IN One Piece, NETFLIX'S NEW ADAPTATION OF THE WORLD'S BEST-SELLING MANGA

- STEVE O'BRIEN

OF THE 10 BEST-selling authors of all time, some names are obvious - William Shakespeare tops the chart, with sales of over (minimum estimate) two billion, and JK Rowling, Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton are all in there.

Then there's Eiichiro Oda. With estimated sales of around half a billion (just think about that for a second), the Japanese author/artist has outsold Dr Seuss, Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Not bad for a writer who's not yet 50 and who only penned his most successful creation One Piece (the biggest selling manga title of all time) in 1997.

If you're one of the 500 million people who've bought one of the 105 collected volumes of One Piece (or indeed have caught one of the 1,000+ episodes of its animated small screen spin-off, or played one of the 40 tie-in videogames), you'll need no introduction to the high seas adventures of Luffy, a superpowered teen who travels the globe, ably assisted by his band of brothers the Straw Hats, in search of the world's ultimate treasure.

CREATOR-APPROVED

Bringing One Piece to TV in live-action form has been a long-time labour of love for showrunners Steven Maeda (The X-Files, Pan Am, Helix) and Matt Owens (The Defenders, Agents Of SHIELD, Luke Cage) - and indeed for Eiichiro Oda, who, fans will be happy to know, is intimately involved in this eight-part series. In fact, he's so integral to this lavishly budgeted Netflix adaptation that he had casting approval for every one of the series' vast cast, including that of the show's hero, Monkey D Luffy.