How did One-Punch Man start as a webcomic?
On a free homepage in 2009, as practice, by a man who just wanted to draw.
ONE started One-Punch Man to practice. He had been sending work to magazines without success, and a webcomic let him post pages on his own schedule: a short version went up on the Shintosha posting site first, and the series proper began on his FC2 blog on July 3, 2009. The name is a joke in Japanese: Wanpanman, a slant rhyme on Anpanman, the beloved children’s hero.
HOW IT GREW
Counted in commentsThe metric was comments
On the Nitosha posting system, a series counted as popular at 30 comments per update. One-Punch Man reached about 30 comments by chapter 5, and around 1,000 per chapter by chapter 30.
7.9 million hits
By June 2012 the site had recorded some 7.9 million hits, the number that made the industry pay attention. Every one of those readers found a comic with deliberately rough art.
The hiatuses are part of the record
ONE paused the comic for about a year from February 2010, citing family circumstances and his day job, and again after chapter 109 in January 2017, returning in April 2019. The webcomic still runs: 155 chapters as of July 2025.
The premise came first
ONE built the series backwards: existing heroes struggle to become the strongest, so he started with a hero who already was, and made the obstacles mundane. In his telling, Saitama also grew out of his own years working part-time jobs in college.