To preface, this is not a thread where I cherrypick tiny parts of panels to dunk on Oda for bad art.
I was struggling to make sense of what I saw in some of the background elements of these panels. I know some of the recent chapters are undercooked, but those chapters don't look like this. This doesn't look like a human error.
Really soak this one in, not just luffy but the linework on the giants. I wanted to know if I was being unfair so I went back a bit, and even just two chapters ago there's nothing like this.
Even in very small and sketchy panels, Oda still clearly has excellent control of a pen:
And while I won't post them here, the unfinished chapters like 1097 are pretty well put-together, although almost none of the inking is done, so you can't really compare.
1117 is the earliest I'm seeing eerily bad linework popping up:
The way I see it this can mean one of two things:
1. Oda has a tremor and can't ink he comic anymore. Sad!
2. Oda & friends are playing with AI.
I think it's AI, using the finished sketches to try and generate an inked and cleaned version. It's not every page or every panel either.
Part of that is just how it looks, how the errors don't follow naturally from the penstrokes. If you know you know.
Another part of it is this RELEASE SCHEDULE. I started noticing these when he switched back to weekly. The guy's body is fucking trashed, why would he suddenly be able to do weekly?
Now, why not have an assistant do the inking? This was my first thought. Wouldn't you get a better result? Well, say Oda finishes sketching like a day before the deadline. What if assistant-kun can't reasonably ink the whole thing in the time left? You might get tempted.
Jump was willing to release unfinished chapters. In the eyes of the publisher, a finished one is not worth a week delay, and OP is too much of a draw to switch to biweekly.
All done, go ahead and call me a schizo now
I was struggling to make sense of what I saw in some of the background elements of these panels. I know some of the recent chapters are undercooked, but those chapters don't look like this. This doesn't look like a human error.
Really soak this one in, not just luffy but the linework on the giants. I wanted to know if I was being unfair so I went back a bit, and even just two chapters ago there's nothing like this.
Even in very small and sketchy panels, Oda still clearly has excellent control of a pen:
And while I won't post them here, the unfinished chapters like 1097 are pretty well put-together, although almost none of the inking is done, so you can't really compare.
1117 is the earliest I'm seeing eerily bad linework popping up:
The way I see it this can mean one of two things:
1. Oda has a tremor and can't ink he comic anymore. Sad!
2. Oda & friends are playing with AI.
I think it's AI, using the finished sketches to try and generate an inked and cleaned version. It's not every page or every panel either.
Part of that is just how it looks, how the errors don't follow naturally from the penstrokes. If you know you know.
Another part of it is this RELEASE SCHEDULE. I started noticing these when he switched back to weekly. The guy's body is fucking trashed, why would he suddenly be able to do weekly?
Now, why not have an assistant do the inking? This was my first thought. Wouldn't you get a better result? Well, say Oda finishes sketching like a day before the deadline. What if assistant-kun can't reasonably ink the whole thing in the time left? You might get tempted.
Jump was willing to release unfinished chapters. In the eyes of the publisher, a finished one is not worth a week delay, and OP is too much of a draw to switch to biweekly.
All done, go ahead and call me a schizo now
