One Piece Vol. 37: Tom
- ISBN
- 9781421534534
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 232
- Chapters
- 347–357
- Anime
- Season 8: Water Seven ep. 229–263
Chapters 347 to 357, and the book where Water Seven stops being about the present. The crew catches up with Robin and Cipher Pol No. 9 and forces a fight, and the back half of the volume leaves the city altogether for the history of the shipwright the book is named after. Chapter 347, 'Six Powers', names the martial system the agents use, which is this arc organizing its opponents as a discipline rather than a collection of oddities. Eleven chapters alternating a fight with a flashback would have been eleven hard weeks in the magazine and are one sitting here, which is the case for the collected edition in a sentence. Season 8 runs from chapter 321 to 377, so a viewer has seen this. Viz gives it 232 pages at $11.99, and no volume in the series runs longer.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Six consecutive chapter titles in the back half read as a biography: 'Tom's Workers', 'The Legendary Shipwright', 'Sea Train', 'Spandam', 'Mr. Tom' and 'Cutty Flam'. That sequence is the volume's real content. Tom taught Franky, entrusted him with the Pluton blueprints and gave up his own life to keep them away from the government, so Franky's refusal in the present is an inheritance rather than stubbornness, and the stakes of the arc stop being a ship and become a document. The front half is a defeat, and a thorough one: the crew reaches Robin, attacks CP9 and is beaten quickly, which is the series recalibrating what its opponents are before Enies Lobby. Chapter 351, 'Klabautermann', names the folkloric spirit said to inhabit a ship, and the Going Merry has been under sentence since Vol. 34. The volume is named after a man who is already dead when it opens, and that is the correct choice.
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