One Piece and Detective Conan/Case Closed are crossing over for a special interview event.
Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece, and Gosho Aoyama, the creator of Detective Conan, have both previously mentioned that they would like to work with each other on some type of project, and an upcoming joint interview between the two celebrated manga authors will finally see the two come together. The interview will be released in two parts, with half appearing in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump, the magazine that serializes One Piece, while the other gets published in Shogakukan's rival periodical, Weekly Shonen Sunday, which has been the home of Detective Conan ever since its 1994 debut. Characters from both series will grace the covers of both magazines, which can be displayed together to create one piece (no pun intended,) of crossover art. The two magazines also released a motion-comic style trailer to celebrate the event.
Aoyama and Oda are legends within the manga industry, as both of their series are the top-selling manga titles in history: Detective Conan/Case Closed is the fourth best-selling manga of all time, with over 250 million copies in circulation around the world, while One Piece is the undisputed most popular manga ever made, with a whopping half-a-billion copies sold worldwide.
2022 has been a big year for both creators' franchises. Detective Conan released its 25th animated film, Detective Conan: The Bride of Halloween, last April in Japan to glowing reviews and solid box-office numbers. The series also debuted the anime adaptations of the long-running series' various spinoffs: the first, Police Academy Arc, premiered in Japan in December of 2021 and has been releasing new episodes throughout 2022, while the second spinoff, Zero's Tea Time, aired its six-episode first season in Japan this spring. Zero's Tea Time focuses on the character of Rei Furuya, an undercover detective, and will be released internationally through Netflix on July 29. The third spinoff, The Culprit Hanizawa, will begin its run this October.
One Piece, meanwhile, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its original publication with a number of new releases and special events. The latest movie in the series, One Piece Film: Red, is scheduled to premiere in Japan this August and internationally later this fall. A special livestream will also be held to mark the franchise's anniversary on July 21 – 22, which will be broadcast in both English and Japanese and is promising to have new announcements about the future of the series. Oda and publisher Shueisha recently confirmed that the long-running series will begin its final saga with the publication of the manga's next chapter on July 25.
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