@Captain:
Would be cool for Greg or someone else with some more industry knowledge to chime in on how long it takes for a volume to be put together, edited and printed after all the chapters are done, and how they're planned out when the details are obviously being set in stone before so much of it is actually drawn.
ahem. I've been working in comics for 20 years in every aspect of the industry.
It takes time to make whatever is new content. Table of contents, character page, SBS stuff, etc… it probably takes Oda about a day to make that stuff and then staff a few hours (we'll just say about a day) to format it nicely. It only takes an hour or two to lay out the files in pagemaker (or indesign or whatever equivalent program) depending on just how well you've mastered hotkeys, how well the files are labeled and if you've automated actions. Editing on new material ideally gets a couple days but in practice things always run last minute so usually its just a few hours or a day to make script changes or art edits. In theory you alway want the product done Thursday so it can be looked at Friday and sent to the printer, but I can't think of any time ever where a comic wasn't getting completed over the weekend to actually go to the printer on Monday.
If the printer has been warned in advance that a book is coming and they've slotted it into the schedule and the get the files promptly, a small run can be printed and assembled in a couple days, a large one in under a week. If there's mistakes or proofs take too long to get approved, can take longer. 200 page trades take a little longer to print, black and white or color isn't affected too much, and those usually take about two weeks. Then the process of packing and shipping everything to the distributor, and then the distrubutor sending that stuff out, takes another week.
Generally from the time an American comic is done to the time it reaches stores, is 3 weeks. Sometimes 4 if circumstances are wonky.
Manga is a bit faster because they're REALLY set up for it, its weekly, and the sales are high enough they can prioritize these things, and Japan is a smaller country... so there the process is about 2 weeks. Officials like column writers and translators get the chapters the same time or shortly after thigns go to the printer, so they get the chapters very quickly after the edits are done, long before the printed product starts going out. Given that Japan is really set up to do huge 500 page issues every week and millions of copies, I can't imagine their trades would take much longer.