King of Artist is the line Banpresto reaches for when a character earns a statue. It opened in December 2014 with a Monkey D. Luffy, and that first piece set the brief the line still follows: one character, sculpted large, posed for motion, finished with the kind of surface work that earns the word artist on the box. Where most prize lines spread a budget across a full roster, King of Artist spends it on a single figure at a time.

One Piece carried the line from the start and still does. The early run reads like a roll call of the crew, Luffy first, then Trafalgar Law, Portgas D. Ace, Sanji, Usopp, Zoro, with Banpresto folding in variant colorways and Special editions that gave collectors a reason to chase the same character twice. As Luffy's arsenal grew through the manga the line grew with it, Gear Fourth's Bound Man and the later Gear 5 statues each getting the King of Artist treatment.

The roster widened without losing that One Piece center of gravity. Gintama's Sakata Gintoki appeared in 2017, My Hero Academia's Deku and Bakugo at the close of the decade, and Jujutsu Kaisen and Tokyo Revengers followed as those titles peaked. When Banpresto's prize business folded into Bandai Spirits in 2018 the branding on the boxes changed while the line ran on uninterrupted.

These are non-scale prize figures, pulled from crane games and lottery counters in Japan rather than ordered as scale releases, which is the channel King of Artist has lived in since that first Luffy. More than ten years on it is still going, with fresh One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen statues on the schedule into 2026.