VIZ Launches VIZ Originals Line With World Piece

The manga industry in the United States is booming right now. Don’t believe me? Check out this screenshot posted to Twitter only a few days ago.

so yeah, this is honestly truly wild to see…(yes, reprinting manga is definitely difficult at the moment!) pic.twitter.com/d7fxvaUUsT

— Justin (@Kami_nomi) June 1, 2021

The fact is that publishers are having the best possible problem right now of not being able to keep up with the monumental demand for printed manga right now. In fact, sales in 2020 increased by almost 43% in the first quarter of 2021, sales of print manga increased by over 3 million units compared to the same period last year. 

This is welcome news for manga publisher VIZ Media who, in 2019, announced their new VIZ Originals imprint. The purpose of the imprint was to create original English language (OEL) manga or, as they refer to it, American manga. Finally, a little over two years later, VIZ is debuting their first VIZ Original title, World Piece. 

This is, of course, not the first time that a company has attempted this. The history of manga in the west is littered with the dried husks of companies that attempted to capture their own lightning in a bottle and create a series that could rival the greats that come out of Japan. It’s difficult to say why VIZ feels that this latest attempt is going to be any different, but they obviously feel pretty confident with their debut title. 

I was recently furnished with a copy of the first volume, let’s take a look through it.

Written by Josh Tierney and illustrated by Agroshka, the primary story of this series follows a young man named Lucus Densen who plays on his school’s basketball team. Actually, it’s fairer to say that he’s mostly tolerated on the team because the girls all love to hang around Lucas. 

When he’s not playing basketball, Lucas’s other hobby is visiting his mother’s archaeological excavations. One day, while visiting one of these sites, Lucas finds and triggers an ancient artifact that transports him into a seemingly endless black void, with the Earth now the size of a basketball. 

Eventually, he meets a girl named Lully who is uber-rich but wants to get away from that and lead her own life. Believing that Lucas is a gift for her, she takes him back to her world of Affin and they start an adventure together. Over the course of the volume, the pair team up with a military soldier who has secrets of his own named Mitton. They also meet other people who desperately want to get their hands on the planet that Lucas is hiding in his backpack.

World Piece tries really hard to take the typical shonen formula and give it a solid twist. While most of us are used to seeing milk toast protagonists who are always shy around girls, Lucas is comfortable around girls and enjoys talking to them, which is admittedly an improvement. On Twitter, Tierney stated that one of the biggest influences on his writing was early Gainax works, which will, according to Josh, become apparent in volume two of World Piece. 

One of the biggest influences on my writing, particularly for World Piece, is classic Gainax anime. (It'll be especially apparent when Vol. 2 releases!) pic.twitter.com/uj596jpil0

— Josh Tierney (@jwtierney) June 9, 2021

It’s hard to say where this story is going to go next. It’s equally hard to say if this series will be successful or not despite getting off to a kind of rough start. If VIZ is confident enough in this title to make it the debut series for VIZ Originals, I’m inclined to give it at least a fair chance.