Logan Paul’s One Piece, Dragon Ball scam completely misses the point of manga

You can’t slab the soul out of the artform

Logan Paul just doesn’t get it. The YouTuber-turned-crypto-bro has been flaunting graded manga on X (formerly Twitter), much to the chagrin of fans everywhere. Alongside the inflated grades of his manga, he has claimed they mark the first appearances of One Piece’s Monkey D. Luffy and Dragon Ball’s Goku. Even if that were true, this whole manga speculation market Logan is suddenly championing misses the entire essence of what manga is supposed to be.

The value of manga isn’t based on its physical condition or historical context, no matter how spotless or old those copies might seem. Series like One Piece and Dragon Ball didn’t become global phenomena because of pristine copies sealed in plastic. They did so through the impact their stories and characters had on fans.

Manga thrives on accessibility; it was built on it. It became a beloved form of Japanese entertainment because it was cheap and widely distributed, two fundamentals that run counter to Logan’s current manga grading efforts. The medium took off in the wake of WWII, thanks largely to Osamu Tezuka and his groundbreaking work, Astro Boy, which went on to sell over 100 million copies worldwide.

Astro Boy (originally Mighty Atom) showed how manga spread through word of mouth rather than marketing. Weekly and monthly anthologies, printed on low-quality paper, flooded the market in the early days, making manga accessible to kids, teens, and adults alike. These weren’t meant to be preserved — you read them, tossed them, and grabbed the next issue. From the beginning, manga’s rise was driven by readership, not collectability.

Manga culture has always been communal, not speculative. Whether it’s trading volumes with friends or debating arcs online, the beauty of the medium lives through discussion and fandom, not the kind of speculative flipping more associated with Western comics or trading cards.

Some argue the same grading standards don’t even apply to manga. As Geoff Thew noted on X, “perfectly centered” tankoban don’t exist since pages are "cut and printed separately." However, the same is true for graded comic books. The difference isn’t structure. It’s how the medium was meant to be valued.

The legitimacy of condition grades will always be in question. It’s not about whether manga can be graded objectively; it’s that manga was never designed to be valued that way. Unlike comic books and trading cards, which both evolved around collector culture, manga was built around circulation, accessibility, and readership.

Coming from someone with a history of questionable ventures — from the fallout of CryptoZoo to the unprecedented rise in Pokémon card prices — Logan’s push into manga speculation feels less like appreciation and more like opportunism. In fact, the same players from his Pokémon card gambit seem to be involved in this charade, with Logan purportedly overpaying for one of the manga volumes by as much as $416,000 to artificially increase its market value.

Logan and his circle may try to assign arbitrary prices to graded manga, but that’s not why we buy them. The value is and has always been found in the story, not the condition of the book. The cultural weight of Eiichiro Oda or Akira Toriyama’s work comes from narrative, characters, and impact, not whether a spine crease should knock it from a 9.8 to a 9.2.

After all, what good is a manga encased in acrylic? Whether it costs $8 or $8,000, a graded tankobon does nothing but sit on a shelf, gathering dust. It becomes a centerpiece that, for all its supposed value, can’t even be properly experienced as the creator intended.

Manga exists to be read, not sealed, scored, and speculated on. Strip that away, and all you’re left with is plastic, paper, and a price tag pretending to matter.