Not saying to trust me because of my title. I haven't actually typed a written translation anything in over a year anyway. I'm just saying that the name sounds phonetically correct given the limitations of the Japanese language.

Interesting theory.

However I think a lot of your argument is based on the assumption that there is an official katakana spelling for the world Dracula. There isn't. Just because Koji Igarashi decided to use ドラキュラ for his Castlevania games does not mean that every Japanese person does so, and it certainly does not make it the official way to spell Dracula in Japanese. In Oda's case he is allowed to spell Dracule however he thinks it sounds like, and ジュラキュウル is just as fine as ドラキュウル. In fact when you pronounce the two of them out I'm pretty sure using the Jyu is a more phonetically accurate rendition of English than the Do version - which is probably why he made the decision to go with the Jyu version.

Thanks for the help, Malintex. I was going to come over here but I guess it sort of just slipped my mind ^^;

@Malintex_Terek:

Actually it's only slightly more popular. If OP and Naruto came out in the same year the est. total circ. manga would be 110,000,000 for OP and 95,000,000 for Naruto. Not that huge of a difference when breaking 100,000,000 is considered a benchmark for a "grand slam shounen success".

This is because the vast majority of shounen readers are young kids and they eat up everything. The difference represents the older readers who also like the series.

Are you sure you have your numbers right, here?

According to http://www.comipress.com/?p=195, One Piece has nearly double the amount of sales of Naruto in Japan. This was taken Sept, 2005. It's been one year since then, and during that year Naruto has been slipping from the #2 spot in Jump's TOC pretty often (losing out to Eyeshield 21), so I can only imagine the gap has grown wider.

Not only that, but if it's true that One Piece sales have overtaken Dragonball since last year, then that would make One Piece Japan's most popular manga of all time. One Piece is a cultural phenomenon in Japan - it's a living classic, to be remembered for many years to come. In ten years time, nobody will even care about Naruto anymore.

Luffy's just special. All he needs to heal is to eat a lot of meat.

Whew.. about time we release 421!

You can grab it off at #rush@irchighway.net, feel free to stick around or drop a comment!
Grab it from Rush|Cube or Rush|Smoker. Chapter 421 is pack #15.

Chapter will be up for HTTP download: http://shlikah.free.fr/download.html in 24 hours or so.

If you enjoy our releases make sure you drop a comment and make our work pay off ^_^

Well I'm thinking more along the lines of an adventure game that doesn't follow the Mugiwara crew. The One Piece world is supposed to be huge, not everything should happen around the Strawhats…

I'd like to see a One Piece EU not in novels or movies or whatnot, but videogames.

Seriously, I think that would be pretty cool. They're making crappy fighting games anyway, why not make some actual adventure games based in the One Piece universe but instead you play as someone who's not really related to the main plotlines in One Piece?

Mmm… Smoker is undergoing maintenance because WZ is in Taiwan ^^;

Fnuck is back. We're cruising now~