How do original drawings like those on view in Art of Manga come to be serialized in magazines and then printed in books? 

In late 2024, the PLAY! MUSEUM in Tokyo held an exhibition titled ONE PIECE ONLY that explored the production process behind the bestselling manga series ONE PIECE by Oda Eiichiro.

It also celebrated the publication of 1,000 serialized chapters and 100 volumes of this one-of-a-kind manga. This is the exhibition’s first overseas venue. ONE PIECE ONLY: How Manga is Made is on view September 27, 2025 to January 25, 2026 in the Piazzoni Murals Room at the de Young.

ONE PIECE holds the Guinness World Record for the manga with the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author, with over 500 million copies in print worldwide. 

In the installation, chapters 1 to 1110 of ONE PIECE, cut directly from the manga, are mounted on fabric and laid out continuously on the gallery wall to create a unique immersive experience.

The exhibition features two short films that take you behind the scenes of the production of Weekly Shonen Jump and Jump Comics. Photographs, color proofs, and printing plates are displayed in “Treasure Boxes” throughout the installation.

Every fan reads this manga, but how is it actually made?

Follow along on ONE PIECE’s journey through various stages of production into two different formats (and sizes): Weekly Shonen Jump magazine and a Jump Comics book. 

Putting pencil to paper: 0 → 364 mm × 257 mm 

A manga begins life at the writer’s desk. Traditionally, rough sketches are drawn on a blank sheet of paper. As details are drawn and dialogue is added, the story slowly takes shape. After this initial drafting stage, the manga is drawn on B4-size (364 mm x 257 mm) manuscript paper. Next comes the inking of the outlines, solid coloring, and application of screen tone, which gives shade, texture, and other nuances to the images. 

For Oda Eiichiro, creating a story and bringing the characters to life by hand are tasks completed solely by him. The manga is produced at a pace of about a dozen pages per week.

Preparing to be published in an anthology magazine: 364 mm × 257 mm → 257 mm × 182 mm

The B5-size (257 mm ×182 mm) Weekly Shonen Jump magazine is produced using the original artwork drawn on B4-size (364 mm × 257 mm) paper. The primary production takes place at Shueisha’s Kyodo Printing Headquarters (Jinbocho, Tokyo) and the Kyodo Printing Goka Plant (Ibaraki Prefecture). The exhibition includes aerial photographs of these sites taken by well-known photographer Naoki Honjo.

The editor receives the original artwork, or genga, and scans it in high-contrast black and white. At this point, the text elements are added, including speech bubbles and sound effects. These are carefully combined with the drawings to ensure that they match up correctly. Pages are finalized, with titles, leads, and tables of contents added before printing.

In 2021, the 1000th chapter of ONE PIECE was produced. The platemaking and typesetting were done at the Kyodo Printing Headquarters. During this process, the image data was burned onto transparent platemaking film. This negative was then used to create a yellow resin printing plate.

Because resin plates gradually wear out, printing large runs of Weekly Shonen Jump required multiple resin plates, which were sent almost daily from Tokyo to their factory in Ibaraki Prefecture. 

As of 2024, this process has been improved upon, and now the completed platemaking data is sent over the network to Kyodo Printing’s Goka Plant. A Computer-to-plate (CTP) flow uses data to generate images, which are then output directly onto printing plates. The material used to produce the printing plates has also changed, and these are now milky white. The platemaking film and yellow resin plates on view are valuable objects that document the evolution of the technology that supports manga magazine printing.

Weekly Shonen Jump is printed using a rotary letterpress (a printing press that uses curved printing plates mounted on cylinders). The production process is carried out at Kyodo Printing’s Goka Plant. Using massive rolls of paper weighing 450 kg, it prints more than 1.5 million pages per hour.

One roll of paper is used every 12 to 13 minutes. The printed sheets are automatically folded. Then they are bound together with color covers and frontispieces, loaded onto pallets by robots, automatically shrink-wrapped, and delivered to trucks.

From weekly magazine to pocket-size comic book: 257 mm × 182 mm → 176 mm × 112 mm 

A pocket-size paperback Jump Comics edition (176 mm × 112 mm) of ONE PIECE was created from the same data used to publish the B5-size (257 mm × 182 mm) Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. Oda Eiichiro created the cover illustration for this book, ONE PIECE’s 100th volume.

The 100th volume of ONE PIECE had an initial print run of over 3 million copies. The design, platemaking, and printing used a large number of colors, with the aim of creating a particularly appealing and celebratory volume. While covers are typically printed in four colors, ONE PIECE adds fluorescent pink to better render skin tones. For the 100th volume, fluorescent blue and yellow were also incorporated, for a total of seven vibrant colors.

To produce the monochrome pages known as honmon (main text), Jump Comics used the same data used to create the original Weekly Shonen Jump. However, Jump Comics volumes are smaller (176 mm × 112 mm) than the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine (257 mm × 182 mm). The aspect ratio of the finished book is different from the magazine, and therefore the placement of the manga artwork in relation to the top and bottom edges of the page has to be altered.

Reproducing the same text again offers a useful opportunity for the publishers to correct any typographical errors and omissions that were printed in the weekly magazine. Once the pages have been reset, the final document is sent from Kyodo Printing to Chuo Seihan Printing for printing and binding.

Since the release of Volume 57 in 2010, the initial print run of every ONE PIECE volume has consistently exceeded 3 million copies. To produce this number of copies, an integrated machine, which performs all the processes from printing to binding, is used.

In conventional printing and binding, one fold is equal to 32 pages, and the folds are bound together. However, the integrated machine can produce two copies of a 192-page book in one go — 384 pages in total. The printed paper is automatically folded onto a large reel and comes out on a conveyer belt folded in a long, thin shape, with the same images connected above and below (called double binding).

The top and bottom images are then cut and separated, and the cover, obi (belt or thin book wrap), and new-release information are attached before the volumes are stacked on a pallet. The integrated machine operates 24 hours a day with three shifts. Over one million copies are produced within a week. Each and every book becomes a unique and valuable treasure to its reader.


This exhibition has been organized by Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with generous support from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.