Ilan Manouach is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose interests include conceptual and post-digital comics. ONEPIECE exists only as an object of pure speculation.” ONEPIECE intensifies this duality as it can only be contemplated as a material instantiation of digital comics’ very own media-saturated digital ecosystem. Although these two functions are not operating along a clear-cut divide, they sometimes run opposite to each other. They have a use value–for readers– and an exchange value for collectors.

ONEPIECE initiates a “computational turn” in comics contributing to the formation of new areas of practice, expanding the ever-growing artistic toolbox allowing artists to think comics in different scales and temporalities. Ilan Manouach’s ONEPIECE proposes to shift the understanding of digital comics from a qualitative examination of the formal possibilities of digital comics to a quantitative reappraisal of “comics as Big Data”.

“The profusion of available online content and the rampant digitization of the comics industry, challenges the state-of-the-art of comics craftsmanship. ONEPIECE is a product of this expanded digital production belt. Readers scan, translate and distribute online their favorite manga series. Online participatory culture and the medium’s new networked possibilities have intensified the nature of comics beyond the scope of professional, established expertise with new and disruptive forms of entrepreneurial fan culture. “Digital comics are at the pulsating center of a global, entertainment industry. The intent of ONEPIECE seems to be to physically realise the idea of an enormous comic run that is widely read digitally, either through legal digital outlets or illegally through scanlation sites, as well as in smaller volumed instalments. They don’t come cheap, however, as getting one will set you back €1900 (roughly US$1925) before shipping, which is also sure not to be cheap. A very limited number of fifty editions of the book exist – and each is signed and numbered by the artist. ONEPIECE was produced in a partnership with JBE books and bound by Elise De Maio. At 500 words a page, that would mean it was roughly 19,218 pages long.

According to Guinness World Records, the longest book – at least defined by characters – is a 1912 novel by Marcel Proust which was 9,609,000 characters long.

One piece manga vol 2