第207回：Ghost Bastar

Recently the potential for an even larger Odaverse became just a tiny bit closer to reality when we learned that a character from Oda’s award-winning one-shot comic WANTED! made a cameo appearance on the pages of ONE PIECE!

WANTED! was originally a 1992 submission by Oda to Shueisha’s annual Tezuka Award program. The program serves as a sort of scouting system for future manga artists. With WANTED! Oda claimed a second-tier award and opened the doorway to his future as a manga artist. Interestingly enough, Oda’s experience at that very same award show was humorously retold in a short comic by Oda’s mentor Masaya Tokuhiro, author of ‘Jungle King Tar-chan’. The comic retells Oda’s meeting with none other than Dragon Ball author Akira Toriyama!

WANTED!’s main character was a gunslinger named Gill Bastar and according to Oda’s confirmation in the Volume 112 SBS, Gill Bastar has been making cameo appearances on and off for years now in the world of ONE PIECE!

Our first glimpse of Gill in modern ONE PIECE (i.e. outside an early ONE PIECE movie cameo) was as a General Zombie during Thriller Bark in Chapter 405 way back in 2007. Based on this lone image, at the time it would have been difficult to make that connection with the only real hints being the type of shirt and hat. However, the grime on the hat cleverly disguises its original shape, making it slightly more difficult to make the connection to Gill’s own. And lest we forget those extra arms clouding the connection even further! The biggest hint would come a whopping SIXTEEN years later jumping all the way to Chapter 1096 in 2023.

Here we have our first big (if not a bit puzzling) hint that the General Zombie from Thriller Bark was Gill and (apparently?!) a member of the Rocks Pirates! We can clearly see both the hat and the shirt along with his glasses. But…somewhat puzzlingly…four arms???? General Zombie Gill had four arms but that could easily be attributed to the twisted work of Hogback. Did Gill have prosthetic arms attached sometime!? Did Oda make a mistake here?

Or…is there something else going on?

In the volume 112 SBS, Oda confirmed that the shadowy figure from Chapter 1096 was in fact Gill and that Gill was a member of the Rocks Pirates. Nothing about the four arms though.

Then, Chapters 1159 and 1161 gave us more glimpses of Gill around the events of the God Valley incident. While 1161 in particular confirms his similarity to Gill’s design from WANTED! he’s only seen with two arms! Suggesting that, perhaps, they’re hidden behind him, or even detachable?


Or……is there something else going on???

FINALLY! In Chapter 1165, Oda drew a massive reveal that suggests Gill might be a previous Hollow-Hollow Fruit user, which in turn might also explain those extra arms from Chapter 1096!

Unless they’re somehow awkwardly hidden, I don’t see an extra pair of arms here…or at least…not on Gill himself. In the world of ONE PIECE, maybe Gill was rumored to be a ‘four-armed gunslinger’. Imagine Moria’s surprise when, upon finding Gill’s body, he only had two arms. Disappointed that he might not be able to use this legendary sharpshooter to his maximum ability, Moria may have ordered Hogback to add the extra arms in order to recreate Gill’s potential!

But…! The entire time! What if those rumored extra arms were never Gill’s to begin with, but the arms of…?!

Anyway! While we can’t say for certain that the events of WANTED! occurred in the world of ONE PIECE exactly as they were written, if even remotely similar events occurred then we might be able to speculate on something curious Gill said to the ghost of Wild Joe. Gill mentioned that he could ‘always see ghosts’, but not as clearly as Joe. In general, the hollows look more amorphous than Joe so this suggests Gill may have been a fruit user even back then! Until now, I always assumed that negative hollows were simply an (explosive) extension of Perona’s powers, but are they actual spirits of the dead from the Land of Yomi? In that case…is there something more to Zoro’s grim reaper experience in Wano? Hmmm… More answers = More questions.

How did Gill meet his end after the events of God Valley? I don’t know if we’ll find out in the main story, but it seems ripe for a side novel…or perhaps even an animated interpretation like the MONSTERS anime! It would be poignant to have Oda’s early work –the one that kicked off this entire journey- receive a lovingly animated adaptation!