One Piece
Eiichiro Oda explains why there is not a single pirate with an eye patch in 'One Piece'
It is not an oversight or lack of interest, the author’s motive has to do with the end of the series.
You may think you’ve seen it all in ‘One Piece’, but you haven’t. There is one thing from the ABCs of piracy that Eiichiro Oda deliberately avoided. Because the mangaka has drawn peg-legged pirates like Zeff, Sanji’s mythical mentor in the Baratie, and his world has also welcomed parrots like the Bald Parrot and the DJ Parrot (or what’s better, pigeons playing the same role, like Hattori, Rob Lucci’s mascot). But what about the eye-patched pirates? Where are the one-eyed crooks that the canon of the genre and the code of good (or bad) buccaneers dictate?
At the time, Eiichiro Oda came up with a much more interesting explanation than anyone could have imagined. Because no, it’s not an oversight or a lack of interest. The mangaka is saving the eye patch for a fundamental character of the end of ‘One Piece’.
“In the final scenes of ‘One Piece’, there is one pirate who appears with an eye patch. I’m itching to draw this character. I thought, if there’s an image in everyone’s head about what a pirate is, then I thought I would write/draw about the process of the boy getting there,” the artist explained years ago (in 2007, to be exact, although he recalled this in more recent statements).
Since then, everyone knows that the day the pirate appears in the eye, the end of ‘One Piece’ will be seen as a real threat and just around the corner. But who could this character be, and is there someone important left to introduce? This question has led many fans of the series to think that we already know the pirate with the patch, but not how he loses his eye.
Many take it for granted that it could be Luffy, something Oda himself seemed to play with in Wano by repeatedly injuring him in one eye (and which he even drew outside of the manga). Others cling to the first sketch of Blackbeard that Oda drew with a patch. And some believe in the fearsome and mysterious Rocks D. Xebec, about whom we know nothing, but whose presence begins to haunt the Mugiwara.
Only time will tell, but if the author feels like it, we don’t even want to tell you.