What is Romance Dawn?
Before the series, there were two one-shots, both called Romance Dawn, both starring a rubber pirate named Monkey D. Luffy, published about a month apart in 1996. They are not the same story told twice. They are two different answers to the same question, and comparing them shows exactly which pieces of One Piece Oda had settled, and which he was still inventing. A year later, the title itself became chapter 1.
VERSION 1
Shonen Jump Summer Special · August 1996The first Romance Dawn ran in the Shonen Jump Summer Special of 1996, a 50 page story built around Shanks: young Luffy, sailing a skiff called the Märchen, retells how the red haired pirate gave him the straw hat, then takes down the pirate Crescent-Moon Gally almost by accident while looking for something to eat. Silk, the young woman who wants to fight the pirates rather than pay them off, is the draft of the crew's navigator. The piracy system is different here: adventure loving "Peace Main" pirates against plundering "Morgania" pirates, categories the series dropped. Luffy also collects the flags of crews he defeats, a habit the series dropped with them. Fans call this version a kind of chapter 0. It was later reprinted in full in the guidebook One Piece Red, and animated in 2008 with the modern crew folded in.
VERSION 2
Weekly Shonen Jump 1996 No.41The second version ran in the main magazine, Weekly Shonen Jump 1996 No.41, and it moves toward the series: the art is livelier, Luffy is more of a goofball, and the structure is closer to chapter 1. But the most famous scene is deliberately reassigned. Oda wanted to keep Luffy's bond with Shanks secret, so in this draft it is Luffy's grandfather, himself a famous pirate, who hands over the straw hat and the fruit. Silk becomes Ann, one step closer to Nami. This version was collected in Wanted!, Oda's 1998 short story collection, where his afterword notes it is the more concise of the two, and it reached the screen as episode 907 of the anime in 2019, for the anime's twentieth anniversary.
ODA ON ROMANCE DAWN
His own account, 2007In the Manga Tengoku interview, Oda is plain about what the one-shots were for. He had wanted a pirate manga since middle school, but refused to spend the idea on a one-shot: "if I was going to do it, I'd make it serialized." With his early work being pulled apart in editorial meetings, Romance Dawn was his last stand play, written to announce a continuing story. Details were still fluid even then: the fruit was originally just the "Gomu Fruit," until his editor asked whether a real gomu fruit might exist, and Oda doubled the name on the spot. "I changed without a second thought but now looking back, that was a nice freakin' idea!"
Both drafts survive in print, which is what makes them documents rather than legends: Version 1 in One Piece Red, Version 2 in Wanted!, a collection Viz has since published in English as Wanted! Eiichiro Oda Before One Piece. Between them sits the whole method of the series to come: keep the captain, keep the hat, keep the fruit, and let everything else be negotiable.