General & Others Is Eiichiro Oda a top 3 mangaka?

[Light D Lamperouge]

Just like the title says, do you think Oda is a top 3 mangaka? Compare him to his contemporaries, predecessors, successors, etc. Shonen/seinen, everything is welcomed.



Here are also some criteria to judge by:
-Plot
-Main characters
-Side characters
-Villains
-Character designs
-Power system
-Story arcs
-Incorporation of themes
-Art
-Imagery
-Panelling
-Originality
-Fights
-World building
-Future potential
-Drawing skills
-Literary skills
-Storytelling
-Writing
etc



Discuss.


​

 

[Garp the Fist]

God, this is going to be one of those threads where people bum up Togashi isn’t it?

 

[Light D Lamperouge]

God, this is going to be one of those threads where people bum up Togashi isn’t it?

I haven't read either of Togashi's works, HxH or YYH, so I can't quite comment much on it, though from some scribbles and such that I've seen I get the feeling that they might be a bit overrated, mostly HxH. Though again it's mostly a feeling, I'd have to actually check them out to judge more accurately.

 

[Warchief Sanji D Goat]

Togashi, Miura, Hara, Araki, Inoue, Arakawa, Murata, Aoyama, Yukimura, Sorachi, Morikawa are all better than Oda.

 

[Buusatan94]

No Oda clearly isn't one of the top 3 mangaka, not in terms of character (especially female ones) and story writing especially with these last two arcs which have lots of terrible moments and subplots and inconsistencies and plot armor and with Wano war being a scenaristic disaster.

He is great at world building, character designs and can make some really beautiful panels but he's very unequal in terms of character writing, he can make great characters and very bad ones, and he tends to use and overuse to death the same classic shonen story tropes and tools without managing to renew or change his formula, and he is terrible at writing and using female characters, and he tends to focus on and favors Luffy too much and to flanderize the Straw Hats lately.

 

[Light D Lamperouge]

Some tags to get this rolling. Apologies to anyone not interested in this.

Spoiler

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etc

 

[Chrono]

No

 

[TheAncientCenturion]

God, this is going to be one of those threads where people bum up Togashi isn’t it?

Not sure why, I've read his magnum opus and it's pretty bad.

 

[GoldDiamond]

No, but oda reminds me of somebody like Lebron, you can't deny his greatness due to longevity peak

 

[Light D Lamperouge]

Not sure why, I've read his magnum opus and it's pretty bad.

YYH or HxH?

 

[SHIHI]

No

 

[Finalbeta]

It's not ordinary feat was Goda sensei accomplished in his life. :cheers:

 

[Jew D. Boy]

He was at one point, but I don’t think it does any good now to gas him up for the first 15 years of his story when the quality has taken a sharp and sustained nosedive for the following ten

 

[Seth]

 

[Lhulu]

Light, I don't think we can use objective criterias to judge works like that. As much we try to be impartial, our taste/emotional will affect it, so I think we can select the bests, however even a TOP 5/10 looks far from reality.

In other hand, greatest and most important are more tangible. Here we have very simple criterias: sales and influence, and yeah, Oda can probably be a TOP 3 here, for the same reason Demon Slayer is now one of the biggest fenomenous in all manga history, even though Goutoge is a very, very mediocre author in my opinion.

I don't have a ranked list of my favorite works and sometimes I even forget a few names, but Oda isn't in my TOP10

 

[ZenZu]

Top 3 Mangaka? Yea I honestly think so, based on a mix of accolades, quantity of chaps, quality of chaps, relevancy, sales etc. This is different from calling One Piece a top 3 manga too.

Oda's a monster who's been doing this consistently for over 2 decades, and his quality didn't really start diminishing till a few years back imo. That's extremely hard to do, in fact I don't think it's ever been done for this long on this schedule. Most long running series can't maintain the same quality 300 chapters in.

Most of the works people praise these days have barely hit the 300 chapter mark. I also don't really want to compare Oda to shorter Seinen works that run on a different schedule, those comparisons can stay in their own lane. If I had to name a goat from SJ weekly serialization I'm going with Oda. Togashi is pretty beast in his own right for having 2 top tier series, but he's constantly taking breaks with HxH so it's easier to maintain quality that way. To do what Oda does you have to be a bit of a nutjob if I'm being honest, the man is way too dedicated to this despite having all the money in the world. What Togashi does is much more relatable to me, most mangaka tap out eventually. Togashi just decided to tap out without seeing his series suffer in quality, most didn't have that luxury. Araki is another name I wouldn't mind calling the goat, he's been dishing out hot content since the 80s and is still relevant, but again I want to give Oda the edge because he's had no breaks since 97.

So in the realm of WSJ yea Oda is the goat imo. His run has been unlike any other.

 

[cleanmrpostman]

Popularity doesn't necessarily = good. No he isn't in my opinion

 

[TheKnightOfTheSea]

Not even top 3 shonen mangaka tbh

 

[Kiwipom]

Out of all the mangas I read, I'd say Oda is definitely one of the best ones.

I don't mean he is perfect by any means, but in terms of a lot of criteria listed, I think for the most part Oda does it above average. Especially during the height of OP, I don't think any series would interest me as much to read 800+ chapters in two weeks like i did when i caught up haha.

OP is getting noticeably worse in the past few years. It goes to show that after writing the same story every day for 20+ years, you kinda lose your touch and creativity you had 20 years ago. But this is also the problem of comparing OP (and Oda's writing) with other mangakas.

Sure, a lot of emerging series that are getting popular now might seem like they're better than OP. But also keep in mind that I'm sure it's a lot easier to write series that are shorter, which may seem to make the mangaka more skilled. Like if OP ended at timeskip, we can all say that OP was pretty great up until that point.

This is the problem with long-running series, they just get worse after a while when the author gets too ambitious, or simply loses creativity for it like you can see with things like Naruto, AoT, or even MHA nowadays (which all had it's heydays too but have fallen off quicker than OP).

And yes you can argue that the length of the series can also be used as a criteria to decide on how good the mangaka is but imo, the fact that OP was able to last this long while still being one of the most interesting mangas I've read shows that Oda is a skilled mangaka.

Too bad OP passed its peak.

 

[Fujishiro]

I haven't read either of Togashi's works, HxH or YYH, so I can't quite comment much on it, though from some scribbles and such that I've seen I get the feeling that they might be a bit overrated, mostly HxH. Though again it's mostly a feeling, I'd have to actually check them out to judge more accurately.

Watch HxH raito.