tada! every どん in ch. 1 of viz's one piece

28 May, 2026

reading a book and not being on A Device is quite simply the best commute activity, so lately i've been reading a lot of paper manga. i burned through witch hat atelier and am probably going to assign it as a text to my intro to programming students next semester. there's a very satisfying cadence where i usually get through the first half of a volume on my way to school and then finish the rest of the volume on my way home.¹

this is an expensive and space-intensive habit, so i got a library card and checked out the first ten volumes of one piece. (i know, it should have been the first twelve.) separately, a while ago i impulse bought the first two volumes of dragon ball and one piece in 日本語, thinking it would be good reading practice. after all, it's comics for children, how hard could it be?²

anyway, since i have both copies i started doing side by side reading on my commute, like this:

complaining about this particular translation by viz has been discussed at great length by other scholars, so i won't repeat their work here, except to say: hoooooo-weeee. i hear a lot about the どん or ドン³ sound effects, so i thought i would compile comparisons of every instance of it in the first chapter. plus a どどん (dodon) and a ズドォン (zudon).

if you're thinking "wow, that 'tada!' really covers a lot more of the art": yeah. you can also see here how the typefaces and font stylings that get used in the japanese are super expressive, and then just get flattened into a single font for most of the english release. and then stretched, rolled, squished, and squashed.

pow! you can tell how much of a jackass shanks is being here because of the little emphasis pauses (っ) between each "ha". having mostly only watched the anime, i knew about ゴムゴムのピストル (gum gum pistol), but a fun thing is that it's written as ゴムゴムの銃 (gum gum gun). fun thing with written japanese.

makino, there's no way those are slip-resistant for working in food service!

i like the cute little rounded tail on this どん。

this one is wild. i know probably these translations were produced in too little time for too little money, but it is bonkers that this is still the only official english translation 30 years after the original publication.

huh?!

imagine kicking someone into the ocean and hearing "bwoink!"

i might describe the little pause after the don (どんっ！) as like... reverberation?

i don't even know what's happening with these english sfx, man. of course, pay very close attention to the lower right where multiple whole ass letterforms were removed.

yeah!!

#manga