How One Piece Went from Flop to Hit in America

gamerant.com:

There is no doubt that One Piece is one of the hottest anime in America. What may be hard to believe is that One Piece wasn’t always the hit in America that it is now. In fact, when the series first landed on our shores, it was an outright flop, and people who had seen it had nothing nice to say about it.

There were tough seas to traverse, bad first impressions to overcome, and a partnership with a company that just wouldn’t give up on them. This is a journey that began all the way back in 2002 when a little magazine named Shonen Jump was about to hit the shores of American bookstores.

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Since the mid-eighties, Viz was always trying to make a go of breaking into the comic book and magazine business. While previous manga anthologies had failed, Viz realized that the market was changing to where family-friendly titles were starting to gain huge audiences. They decided to make a deal where they would bring the popular Weekly Shounen Jump magazine over to America as Shonen Jump. They would launch it with five series: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z, Sand Land, Yu Yu Hakusho, and the final launch title would be a little pirate series known simply as One Piece.

When Shonen Jump hit the newsstands Viz prominently marketed the fact that the magazine had Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z, as the former was one of the hottest series on Kids WB while the latter was still a favorite on Toonami. Yet at the back of the magazine was One Piece, and its unique art style and witty sense of humor was already catching the eye of readers. Other series would join the magazine in the coming weeks, yet readers couldn’t stop talking about the series with a rubber man whose goal was to become the King of the