One Piece, Chapter 930: Ebisu Town
Wow, what a chapter, huh? The first half of the chapter is another pretty tame world-building segment, basically just Zoro arriving at Ebisu Town, a town named after a Japanese deity of fortune. It's... it's not the most interesting thing to read, I'll be honest, because Wano-kuni has been pretty full of "oh, hey, look at this character" before moving straight to the next one without making the previous characters (except maybe Tama and Kiku) feel relevant beyond a vague sense of maybe they'll have a role in the future. In Ebisu Town's case, it's a town filled with people that are suffering but are also laughing at their misfortune. Okay?
Meanwhile, the Big Mom Pirates have shown up, pretty unexpectedly, and we get a neat little montage of a good chunk of Big Mom's children -- Perospero, Smoothie, Daifuku -- deflecting Kaidou's cannonballs as they ride up the waterfall of Wano with a bunch of giant carps pulling Big Mom's ship. Curiously, Katakuri's not there. Also very curiously is how Kaidou is super-furious at his men and... not engaging Big Mom himself?
But I'm honestly not quite sure what happened in the next two-page spread, and the flow of panels doesn't really illustrate just why Big Mom's ship suddenly tumbles down the waterfall. Did King ram the ship? The scene just show one of Jack's lieutenants, King, appearing in the distance, and then the ship... topples backwards? I guess King slams into it and knocks it backwards? King's apparently a devil fruit user, and transforms into a pretty badass-looking black pteranodon with badass armour latched on. Love the design, and while the plot development is still pretty badass, I feel like it isn't particularly clear just what happened in that sequence. Interestingly, we get to see a couple panels of Big Mom apparently sinking into the water, and she is a Devil Fruit user. No, it's clearly not taking Big Mom out entirely, but it's definitely interesting to see what's going to come of this.
Meanwhile, the rest of the chapter continues the whole bit with Kaidou's front-liners or whatever hunting down "Sangoro", with Page One the emo spinosaurus smashing random soba shops and demanding that the innocent people call out for Sangoro to show up. We get a fun comedy bit between Usopp and Sanji, a bit of nice moment from Law re-establishing that he is super-serious and pragmatic... and then Sanji, of course, can't bear to ignore random people being oppressed because of him, so he goes and kicks Page One in the face, before declaring that he'll beat them all out without revealing his identity. Which, in this case, apparently means using his raid suit. I was wrong, then -- Sanji is going to use the Power Ranger suit, but at least there's a neat reason for that.
Overall, a pretty neat chapter! In retrospect, I actually liked the Page One sequence a lot more than I think I would. It's kind of an obvious, sort of cliched villain thing to do, but it's well-done, and juxtaposed quite well with Law telling them to ignore Page One and that the mission comes first. Pretty neat stuff.
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