Dragon Ball (manga)

• 1. Introduction

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  519 chapters of Dragon Ball, a Japanese manga by Akira Toriyama, filled 42 tankōbon volumes. By 2022, those volumes had sold 260 million copies worldwide. Toriyama, though, never planned for such a run. He first guessed that the story would last about a year, or end as soon as its magical orbs were collected.

  So how does a creator who wanted out of one hit series end up writing another that outgrows every plan? Why did a series that began as comedy turn into a fighting epic? And which novels, films and video games did Toriyama borrow from along the way?

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• 2. The Saga

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  Son Goku, a monkey-tailed boy, and a teenage girl named Bulma set out to find seven Dragon Balls, which summon the dragon Shenlong to grant one wish. On the road they meet the desert bandit Yamcha, who becomes an ally, and Chi-Chi, whom Goku unknowingly agrees to marry. They also meet Pilaf, an impish man who wants the orbs so he can rule the world. Goku trains under the martial arts master Kame-Sen'nin for the Tenkaichi Budōkai, a fighting tournament. There the monk Kuririn becomes his training partner and first rival. Afterward Goku almost single-handedly defeats the Red Ribbon Army and its hired assassin, Taopaipai.

  Three years later, at the next tournament, Goku faces Taopaipai's brother Tsuru-Sen'nin and his students Tenshinhan and Chaozu. Then the story turns dark. Kuririn is killed, and Goku tracks the killer's leader, Piccolo Daimao, only to lose to him. The samurai Yajirobe carries Goku to the hermit Karin, who heals him and gives him a power boost. Meanwhile Piccolo Daimao kills Kame-Sen'nin and Chaozu, then uses the Dragon Balls to regain his youth and destroy Shenlong. Goku kills him, but before dying Piccolo Daimao spawns a son who is also his reincarnation, named Piccolo. Goku then trains for three years under Kami, the original creator of the Dragon Balls, who restores Shenlong and revives the slain friends. At the following tournament Goku spares Piccolo, because killing him would also kill Kami. Goku leaves with Chi-Chi to keep his promise to marry her.

  Five years later, a man named Raditz lands on Earth. Goku is by now a young adult and the father of a son, Gohan. Raditz claims Goku is really his younger brother Kakarrot, one of the Saiyans, a nearly extinct extraterrestrial race. Goku was sent to conquer Earth, but a severe head injury in infancy erased his memory of the mission. Goku refuses to carry it out. He joins Piccolo to kill Raditz, at the cost of his own life. In the afterlife he trains under the North Kaiō until the Dragon Balls revive him to face the invaders Nappa and Vegeta. Yamcha, Chaozu, Tenshinhan and Piccolo die in that battle, and the Dragon Balls cease to exist. Another set waits on the planet Namek, Piccolo's homeworld, and the galactic tyrant Freeza wants it too. Vegeta ends up standing with the heroes against Freeza's mercenary team, the Ginyu Force. Goku finally beats Freeza by transforming into a legendary Super Saiyan. Freeza barely survives and flies to Earth for revenge, but a Super Saiyan from the future named Trunks kills him.

  Manga author Nobuhiro Watsuki later pointed to this habit of bringing characters back from the dead as a turning point. In his view, shōnen manga had traditionally shown heroes and enemies killing each other for good, and that shifted once Dragon Ball started the trend of resurrection.

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• 3. Borrowed Foundations

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  In 1980, Akira Toriyama created the popular manga Dr. Slump, and within roughly six months he wanted to end it. His publisher Shueisha agreed only if he promised to begin another serial soon after. Working with his editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, he drafted several one-shot stories, but none succeeded. Torishima then noted that Toriyama loved kung fu films and proposed a kung fu shōnen manga.

  Hong Kong martial arts cinema supplied the spark, including Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon from 1973 and Jackie Chan's Drunken Master from 1978. The fight scenes in Jackie Chan's films mattered most to him. Toriyama said he would never have come up with Dragon Ball without Drunken Master, which he enjoyed partly for its light-hearted tone. The first result was Dragon Boy, a two-part story in the August and October 1983 issues of Fresh Jump. In it, a boy skilled at martial arts escorts a princess back to her home country. Readers received it very well, and it grew into the serial.

  The frame came from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Goku maps onto Sun Wukong, whose name is read "Son Goku" in Japanese. Bulma stands in for Tang Sanzang, Oolong for Zhu Bajie and Yamcha for Sha Wujing. Toriyama wanted that novel's basic theme combined with "a little kung fu." Torishima chose the novel largely because it was a free intellectual property. A Chinese setting was also uncommon in manga then, which set the new series apart from the US West Coast feel of Dr. Slump.

  The quest itself changed. In the novel, travelers cross the Western Regions of Central Asia to fetch sacred Buddhist texts from the Indian subcontinent. Toriyama swapped that for gathering orbs that grant a wish, a game-like task meant to appeal to the magazine's shōnen readers. The idea came from the Japanese epic Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, written from 1814 to 1842. In that book, heroes collect eight large Buddhist prayer beads from eight regions of Japan. Toriyama chose seven orbs from seven locations so the count would not match the beads.

  The title came from Enter the Dragon and from the later Bruceploitation knockoff kung fu movies, which so often carried the word "Dragon" in their names.

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• 4. From Comedy to Combat

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  Toriyama suspected that fighting would suit shōnen readers better, yet he stuck with the Journey to the West style of adventure that he himself enjoyed. The setting changed every chapter, with new enemies and new places. The manga was not popular at first. It took Torishima's nagging about the poor popularity to wear him down. Toriyama gave in and wrote more battles, beginning with the first Tenkaichi Budōkai on the page. Despite his reluctance, he admitted it felt good when readership picked up. He still resisted. The Red Ribbon Army arc went back to adventure, and a visit to Penguin Village from Dr. Slump added comedy. When that did not work, fighting became the main theme.

  Critics noticed the shift. Jason Thompson wrote that the manga "turns from a gag/adventure manga to a nearly-pure fighting manga." James S. Yadao, author of The Rough Guide to Manga, said the first several chapters play out like Saiyuki, the Journey to the West, with Dr. Slump-like humour built in. He felt the series found its unique identity after Goku's group first disbands and Goku trains under Kame-Sen'nin. In the second half, Yadao saw "a far more action-packed, sinister tone," with wilder battles and a higher death count.

  The long middle of the series strained its author. During the Android and Cell arc, Toriyama felt he could not top the Freeza arc. He added time travel but struggled with the plot, able to think only about the coming week's chapter. After Cell's death he meant for Gohan to replace Goku as the protagonist, then decided the boy did not suit the role. He felt the story could not end there and carried on into the Majin Boo arc.

  Resolved to make Boo the finale, Toriyama drew what he wanted. He added comedy through Gohan's Great Saiyaman persona and the character Gotenks. Yet he had no ending in mind until the final chapter. At the time, he gave the series a low-key ending so that the story might seem to continue. He later said he skipped 10 years ahead to signal that it was truly over. For the kanzenban edition, he altered the ending slightly to make plain that Goku's battles were finished and a new generation was taking over.

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• 5. Pen and Deadlines

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  Most manga artists draw a rough draft called a "name," then a detailed storyboard, then the final pages. Toriyama skipped the first stage, simply because it was less work. He did not plan story details ahead, and when serialization began he had storyboards for only three chapters. He would wait until about two days before the deadline to start. Around midnight he began the storyboard and finished near six in the morning. He then inked until night, completing a chapter in roughly a day and a half. Unlike other artists, he had only one assistant.

  His one confidence was in tying a story back to an earlier element so that it looked like planned foreshadowing. He did use suggestions from fan mail, though generally by doing the opposite. Many fans told him not to kill Vegeta, and that is exactly what he did.

  In the second half of the series he grew more interested in inventing the story than in drawing it. He simplified his lines, and the battles became more intense. When readers wrote that the art had become "too square," he made it squarer on purpose. Years later he said that speed is the most important quality of an action manga, so he did not draw elaborately. Machines were the exception. He enjoyed designing original mecha, imagining how a pilot enters and where the engine sits. Real-world objects needed references, and a small error would show. Since most cars were very square when he began, he drew only round ones.

  In 1995, Toriyama described his tools. A Zebra G-pen nib lasted him about three chapters, because he rarely pressed hard. His black ink was made by Pilot, and his color ink by Luma, applied with a ten-year-old fine point Tenshōdō brush. A seller connected to Shueisha gave him free Kent paper, similar to Bristol board. He also used a 0.5mm 2B mechanical pencil and a wide ruler at least 30 cm long.

  Wanting to escape the Western flavor of Dr. Slump, he gave Dragon Ball Eastern scenery. The island that hosts the Tenkaichi Budōkai is modeled on Bali in Indonesia, which he visited in 1985. Photos of Africa inspired the area around Bobbidi's spaceship. He imagined a fictional world largely based on Asia, blending Japanese, Chinese, South Asian, Central Asian, Arabic and Indonesian cultures, and he drew on the jinn of The Arabian Nights. Fights took place in uninhabited spots, which spared him from drawing residents and ruined buildings. Drunken Master served as his reference for the training scenes.

  Muscle Tower, from the Red Ribbon Army storyline, came from the beat 'em up game Spartan X, called Kung-Fu Master in the West. In that game enemies appear very fast as the player climbs a tower. The game was itself inspired by Jackie Chan's Wheels on Meals and Bruce Lee's Game of Death.

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• 6. Names and Powers

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  Kakarrot, Goku's Saiyan name, is a pun on carrot. Toriyama's character names are almost always puns that share a theme with related characters, most commonly food. All the Saiyans are named after vegetables. The syllables of saiya are an anagram of yasai, the Japanese word for vegetable.

  To create a character, Toriyama drew the face and body type first, then the clothes, while checking whether a fighter could move in them. He avoided villains so unscrupulous that they would affect readers psychologically. That was not out of concern for others. He simply did not enjoy drawing such things. Few characters carry screentone, because he found it hard to use. He asked Torishima for as few color pages as possible and did not worry if clothing colors changed from one to the next.

  Against the convention that the strongest fighters should be the largest, he gave Goku and many other powerful characters small statures. He also had Goku grow up, because fight scenes were easier to draw that way. Torishima opposed the change at first, since a manga lead rarely changes so drastically. He later called it his own biggest crisis of the series, because Toriyama threatened to end the manga if Goku could not grow up. The editor's fears proved unfounded, as readers accepted the change without complaint.

  Piccolo Daimao, the first truly evil villain, was the part of the series that Toriyama found most interesting to draw. Freeza took shape around the time of the Japanese economic bubble, inspired by real estate speculators whom Toriyama called the "worst kind of people." Yū Kondō, his second editor, and Fuyuto Takeda, his third, both said popularity peaked during the Freeza arc. In a Weekly Shōnen Jump popularity poll of one thousand ballots, Dragon Ball received 815 votes. Escalating enemies troubled the author, so he created the Ginyu Force to add balance. When he invented the Super Saiyan transformation, he made Goku's hair blond because it was easier for his assistant, who spent a long time blacking in the black hair. The piercing eyes were based on Bruce Lee's paralyzing glare.

  Toriyama personally disliked naming fighting techniques, joking that in a real fight you would be killed before you could shout the name. Torishima felt names were best, so Toriyama made them all up. The exception was the signature Kamehameha, which his wife named when he could not decide. He matched names to the fighter, saying someone like Vegeta would use English names, while sophisticated characters like Piccolo got kanji.

  To move the story along without inconvenient travel, he invented the flying cloud Kinto-un and the flying technique Bukū-jutsu for most fighters. Goku alone received the teleportation ability Shunkan Idō. Later, Toriyama told his long-time friend and fellow manga artist Masakazu Katsura that nothing was stronger than a Super Saiyan. Katsura suggested making two characters fuse together, and that became the Fusion technique.

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• 7. Editions and Censorship

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  Dragon Ball ran in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump from the 20th of November 1984 to the 23rd of May 1995. The tankōbon volumes appeared from the 10th of September 1985 through the 4th of August 1995, with any color pages printed in grayscale. Torishima said the covers were deliberately made to stand out on store shelves. They were mostly white, with a single picture running across the spines.

  Between December 2002 and April 2004, a set of 34 kanzenban volumes restored the color artwork and added new covers drawn by Toriyama. Designer Hideaki Shimada proposed bright red after watching South Korea play in the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Toriyama had already drafted the first four covers in vibrant green, but he agreed. Shimada also wrote "Dragonball" in lowercase, in a taller, thinner font, for a neater look.

  In English, Viz Media holds the license for North America. Starting in 1998, Viz released monthly comic books and split the story into Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z to match the anime, feeling that this would reduce confusion. Only with 14 volumes released from 2013 to 2016 did the whole series appear in English under the single name Dragon Ball. The UK saw Gollancz Manga volumes from August 2005 to November 2007, before Viz took over that license. Madman Entertainment released the series in Australia and New Zealand. Publishers in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland and Sweden also licensed it.

  In November 1999, Toys "R" Us removed Viz's Dragon Ball from its stores nationwide. A Dallas parent had complained of "borderline soft porn" after buying the books for his four-year-old son. Critic Susan J. Napier judged the ban a clash of cultures, since Japan tolerates sexuality in manga while other countries do not. In 2000, Viz reluctantly began to censor the series. Toriyama suggested hiding Goku's genitals behind objects rather than, in his words, "neuter him." A fan petition gathered over 10,000 signatures, and a year later Viz stopped the censoring. It raised the age rating to 13 and up and reprinted the first three graphic novels. Some characters' lips stayed fully shaded in, to avoid racist stereotypes such as the image of Mr. Popo.

  In October 2009, Wicomico County Public Schools in Maryland banned the manga from its district. The stated reason was that it "depicts nudity, sexual contact between children and sexual innuendo among adults and children." Reviewers Robin Brenner and Eva Volin of School Library Journal criticized the parents for going to a county council member rather than to the school librarian.

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• 8. Reach and Legacy

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  In 2006, close to 79,000 Japanese fans voted Dragon Ball the third greatest manga of all time, in a poll for the 10th anniversary of the Japan Media Arts Festival. The sales figures back up that devotion. During its serialization Weekly Shōnen Jump reached its highest circulation, an average of 6.53 million weekly sales, and the manga is credited as a main reason for it. Over those years the magazine's total circulation topped 2.9 billion copies. By 2000, more than 126 million tankōbon copies had sold in Japan. By 2008, over 150 million copies were in circulation, the best total for any manga at that time. In 2012, Shueisha announced more than 156 million, second among Weekly Shōnen Jump manga behind One Piece. The series has been translated and released in over 40 countries.

  In 2011, Jason Thompson, a critic and the editor of Viz's editions, said: "Dragon Ball is by far the most influential shonen manga of the last 30 years, and today, almost every Shōnen Jump artist lists it as one of their favorites and lifts from it in various ways." He pointed to its formula of lots of martial arts, lots of training and a few jokes, which became a model for series such as Naruto. He also noted the look of Goku. Hit shōnen heroes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as those in City Hunter and Fist of the North Star, were manly, while Goku was small and cartoonish.

  Toriyama himself was puzzled by the global success, nearly two decades after the series ended. He said: "Frankly, I don't quite understand why it happened. While the manga was being serialized, the only thing I wanted as I kept drawing was to make Japanese boys happy."

  Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece, and Masashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto, have said that Goku inspired both their main protagonists and their series' structures. In 2006, Toriyama and Oda made a single crossover chapter of Dragon Ball and One Piece, titled "Cross Epoch." For the kanzenban edition, every odd-numbered volume carried a tribute illustration by an artist who was a child during the serialization, including Tite Kubo, creator of Bleach. Katsuhiro Harada, producer of the Tekken games, said Dragon Ball was among the first works to visually depict chi, which influenced Tekken and Street Fighter. Nobuyuki Sakakibara, founder of Pride Fighting Championships and Rizin Fighting Federation, noted that Toriyama imagined a tournament of martial artists from different disciplines in 1985, before mixed martial arts was coined. Canadian fighter Carlos Newton even named his style "Dragon Ball jiu-jitsu."

  The influence reaches beyond entertainment. After searching for a real-life equivalent of the Senzu, the supernaturally nutritious bean, Mitsuru Izumo founded the Euglena Company in 2005 to make supplements and food from euglena. In 2014, entomologist Enio B. Cano named a beetle Ogyges toriyamai after Toriyama and another Ogyges mutenroshii after the character Muten Roshi. In 2025, researchers named a goby fish Vanderhorstia supersaiyan for its yellow stripes.

  On the 27th of March 2013, the exhibit "Akira Toriyama: The World of Dragon Ball" opened at the Takashimaya department store in Nihonbashi. It drew 72,000 visitors in its first nineteen days and later traveled to Osaka and to Toriyama's native Nagoya. In 2015, the Japan Anniversary Association declared the 9th of May "Goku Day," because the numbers five and nine can be pronounced "Go" and "Ku." Dragon Ball Store Tokyo, the first retail store devoted to the franchise, opened at Tokyo Station Ichibangai on the 14th of November 2025. Meanwhile the story goes on. Dragon Ball Super, a midquel, has been published in V Jump since 2015, written by Toriyama and illustrated by Toyotarou.

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