The galleon-split visual idiom recurs at every later top-tier swordsman moment:
Mihawk vs Krieg fleet (Ch. 50 — the seed): off-page cleaving, aftermath
shown.
Mihawk vs Luffy at Marineford (Ch. 568): single-stroke glacier slice
(with the cross-dagger pendant alone).
Mihawk vs Don Krieg’s flagship (Ch. 50 backstory restated Ch. 52-53):
on-page demonstration.
Zoro vs Pica’s stone-statue (Ch. 780): the student-reaches-the-idiom
payoff — Zoro performs a galleon-class single-stroke split on a moving
stone mountain. The Ch. 50 seed pays off in Zoro’s own hand 730 chapters
later.
Zoro vs King at Onigashima (Ch. 1034): the next tier of the same idiom
— Zoro single-strokes a calamity-tier opponent in flight.
Earliest known caller
Not applicable — the visual idiom is installed on-page in Ch. 50.
Why this matters
Oda’s off-page-feat-shown-via-aftermath technique is a labor-saving
compositional grammar — the chapter doesn’t have to animate the
galleon-cleaving; it just shows the cleaved galleon and the swordsman
in adjacent panels. The reader’s imagination supplies the stroke. The
technique is cheaper than the demonstration and more impressive than
the demonstration — the unbounded imagination is always more powerful
than the bounded animation.
Future-Claude: any later top-tier feat shown only via aftermath should be
read as Mihawk-galleon-grammar. The technique implies the feat is above
the chapter’s drawing-budget for the moment — the on-page version is being
saved for a later climactic chapter. Track: which later off-page feats get
on-page demonstrations and when?