Wanted! is a collection of Eiichiro Oda's work prior to One Piece. Which, if this volume is comprehensive, consists of 5 stories. That's including Romance Dawn, the last entry in the book, which is kind of a dry run/first draft for One Piece, as it consists of a kid in a straw hat named Luffy with rubber powers, who wants to be a pirate. It doesn't get as far as Luffy actually recruiting a crew; he saves a young girl who was trying to protect her friend (who is a magic bird) from some creepy-looking guy with weird powers.
All the stories have comedic elements to varying degrees, and fall into different genres or styles. WANTED! is a Western, with a legendary gunman being haunted/annoyed by one of the bounty hunters who failed to kill him. The lead, Gill, spends most of the episode trying to run away or outsmart his pursuers, or yelling at the ghost to shut up as it plots his demise. Future Present from God is set in the modern day, about a pickpocket that God intended to kill for being a negative to society, but God fucked up and now said pickpocket has to keep a department store full of people from dying in a meteorite impact. Ikki Yako follows a cowardly monk (named Guko, and there's a monk named Ginko from a series called Mushi-shi. I don't know if Oda was spoofing that, or it's just a coincidence. He says he just thought a monk manga might be fun to do) who gets roped into trying to vanquish an evil spirit terrorizing a village.
Monsters is the closest to an entirely serious story, as it involves a swordsman who poses as a courageous hero, but actually uses a town's terror at an impending dragon attack as a cover to rob everyone's homes after they flee. There's another swordsman, Ryuma, overly serious and quick to anger, looking for the greatest swordsman in the world so he can challenge them. But he seems like an idiot, and managed to piss off the entire town because it seems like his fault the dragon's coming.
One thing the first 4 stories have in common is late surprise twists. That Gill was never actually in any real danger from the dangerous bounty hunter after him, because his skills are far greater. The thief pulling a fast one on God, Guko seeming like a talentless coward for 90% of his story, then becoming a badass at the very end. Monsters has a last page reveal about the true identity of the mysterious swordsman "King," that Ryuma's looking for. Romance Dawn's the exception, as Luffy shows off his powers about halfway through, and had already told us in a flashback he ate a mysterious fruit, albeit without telling us what it granted him.
The other thing I notice is the newer works tend to have fewer panels. WANTED! runs 6-8 panels a page, in a variety of layouts, for basically its entire length. Meanwhile Romance Dawn is almost entirely 4-6 panels, minus a handful of pages near the end with only 2 panels. Those are usually pages that involve someone getting hit, so the reduction in panels might reflect a shift towards more action-oriented stories. The 2-panel pages start to appear in Monsters, where Oda understandably seems to want more space to draw a guy leaping at the jaws of a dragon.
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