The Blackbeard scene was hilarious and awesome.
Good to know that Blackbeard is still an awesome fun character like Luffy and he's not gonna be boring and overpowered like some shounen baddies coughcough*aizen/sasukue*coughcough
I like how he has sentimental attachment to his little raft, which is why he's always using it
It's crazy how many characters are being setup to actually be important major characters down the line. Donflamingo is crazy psycho, Traflagar actually seems like he'll be a good rival to Luffy, Akainu is taking over the marines and making them fearsome, the other rookies are all doing their own thing. Impressive stuff. There's so much story Oda is going to be able to get out of these characters and that's not even including all the new characters he'll introduce in the new world arcs. This 2nd half of the series is going to be LONG and full of OH SHIT moments I think. But I guess when the first half went over 10 years of weekly chapters...you got a lot of time to cover things
Cool that all the support crew are going to get real major powerups and not just one new attack or something. But actually changes to their character fight styles for the next half of the manga.
Also really like the flashbacks. This is the perfect way to really tie things together from the first half. Reintroduce the character pasts, connections to luffy and their goals. If there was anytime to kind of pause and recap a bit to pull everyone together as a crew, this would be the best spot.
It's so hard reading this part of OP at a weekly pace because there's just SO MUCH to cover that it's going to take a couple months of these transition chapters before we settle down into normal storytelling again. But considering how much Oda is making use of each page and conveying lots of info every week, it's about the best you can do and you really wouldn't want him to rush through this stuff since it's important. It'll take months but I think it'll be a strong transition arc when looked back on in volume form.
Oda