January 1

As we begin a new year, I resolve to make more left turns. My most common candidates for this blog tend to be musicians, ones that have a neat music video I remember. But there's already plenty of music birthday sites out there (and at least one of them is awesome.) So, I'm not giving up video clips, and I'm not giving up musicians, but I'm going to try to feature other kinds of people.
Like Eichiro Oda, manga artist and creator of One Piece. He's kind of a manga prodigy; although he officially entered the Japanese comic book industry at 17, his first published character debuted years earlier. Actually, he started winning awards for his work at 17. At 19, he got hired as an assistant on the book Rurouni Kenshin, a comic that would eventually debut Luffy, the eventual hero of One Piece. At 22, One Piece debuted; it has since become the highest selling manga in history.
One Piece has since become a popular anime on both sides of the Pacific (although English-language fans are still waiting for a respectable dub), along with all the other typical spin-offs that a media darling inspires. New episodes are supposed to be on Hulu.com, but I don't know when they'll start charging, so let me share with you a classic AMV by Ninja of the Night, featuring clips from One-Piece atop "The Ballad of Captain Hampton" by the Aquabats:

The comic isn't that much different...