With another break comes another rewritten volume! Vocabulary, as always, is key here, maintaining the contrast between the extremely casual, even rude, Straw Hats and kids vs the eloquent snootiness and formality of the mansion staff.
Read volume 4 here!
I’ve made my first departure from established names here with the Black Cat Pirates’ Siam and Butch. Sham might have worked for the live action, where the character was actually putting on a sham, but it makes more sense for a cat-themed crew to invoke the Siamese breed in the manga. And Butch, as a reasonable transliteration of the Japanese Buchi, pays homage to the Butch Cat character from Tom and Jerry, a known influence of Oda’s.
As we go deeper into the Kuro arc, we hit one of the frustrations of early One Piece: the commentary from the peanuts gallery. Every step of the fight seems to be punctuated by some random underlings going “Woah, he really hit him!” or “There’s no way you can survive the boss’s next move!” And while these things are easy to gloss over and barely notice as a reader, when you have to actually write out every single one of them, the repetition gets painful.
Sometimes they do serve a purpose – at the start of a character or after a scene change, to remind the reader or fill a returning weekly reader in on the last thing that happened so they know who has the upper hand – but just as often they show up mid-chapter to tell you something you just saw. And this element is not going to get better until after the Baratie at least.
This is a good place for the upcoming anime remake to do some streamlining and really focus on using its screentime for the stuff that matters.