Endurance Curry Pirates

This band of pirates owes its existence to a reader competition that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump during the year 2000. Eiichiro Oda sketched out the group with help from two fellow manga creators, Nobuhiro Watsuki of Rurouni Kenshin and Hiroyuki Takei of Shaman King. What started as a one-off contest gimmick finally earned a place in canon roughly two dozen years afterward, surfacing within the manga during the Final Saga.

Their emblem is hard to mistake. A glowering skull sits above a pair of crossed bones, and balanced on its crown is a serving of curry. Because the crew flew it on a black banner, part of the dish blends into the dark fabric and disappears from view.

Exactly how dangerous the crew is has never been measured in the story, yet their original purpose hints at real ferocity. They were built to be a tough opponent for readers in the Jump contest, and their assigned numbers told the tale: a punishing 90 in attack, nothing at all in defense, and a meager 10 in speed. That spread paints them as relentless attackers with almost no protection to fall back on.

When they finally appeared in the narrative, the moment was a quiet one. The crew tuned in to Dr. Vegapunk's global transmission and broke into celebration the instant the speech confirmed that the One Piece truly exists.

Hippie captains the crew, a design Oda handled personally before farming out the other two members to his guest collaborators. The group traces back to a Jump project called KKD, short for a phrase meaning roughly an unmatched great sea battle of pirates. Readers entered trios of fighters, splitting one hundred ability points across attack, defense, and speed, and a computer simulated the clashes automatically.

From over five thousand entries, a squad calling itself Bakudan, the Bomb Gang, took the crown and won a special Oda illustration that placed them beside Luffy, Zoro, and Nami. Oda was unhappy with that result, so he conjured the Endurance Curry Pirates as a fresh challenger. In the deciding showdown, Bakudan, aided by Luffy, came out on top.