I really, really enjoyed this essay by Joseph Rooks on One Piece, the best-selling Manga series by Eiichiro Oda:

The beauty of One Piece isn’t in checking-off a shopping list of story elements, but in pushing the limits of just how much imagination and detail a human being can pour into twenty pages of art and storytelling week after week, for fifteen years and counting.

Oda has a talent for weaving disparate details together, collected from every cultural and historical source he can absorb, to create something new and exciting. This skill is most apparent in the colorful designs of his characters and the settings in which they are introduced.

One Piece is creativity in its purest form, definitely a must-read.