DB30YEARS: Special Dragon Ball 30th Anniversary Magazine
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(as a gag) and even biting, may feel a tad bit familiar.
This creature is even referred to in supplemental materials as a “Teapot Genie” (茶瓶魔人 chabin majin), and certain elements of this story feel quite similar to the story arc surrounding Majin Buu, another “genie” you may have heard of. Of course, that is because they (along with Mr. Popo) draw on some of the same sources for inspiration. Its clothes, too, are less Buu’s in particular than the generic “Middle Eastern” style Toriyama also used with Bulma during the end of the first Dragon Ball hunt. But the similarities are there.
God
An old man with a long beard, who carries a familiar-looking staff, and has a penchant for porn. Kame-sen’nin, is that you...? Actually, it’s none other than God. No, not the green one. This is the God of Dr. Slump, who originally intends to “cleanse” the earth of humanity and start over, but has an inadvertent change of heart thanks to Senbe & co.
So what is he doing in the guise of an old martial-arts master in Dragon Ball? In his “Ask-Me-Anything” corner for tankobon volume 3, Akira Toriyama reveals that he liked the character a lot, so he reused him in Dragon Ball, simply sticking sunglasses on him. Thus Kame-sen’nin was born. (The similarity is even more obvious in his guise as Jackie Chun, where he’s not wearing the shades.) The former character’s penchant for puns, however, ended up being removed, and was later transferred to Kaio.
It doesn’t stop there, though: the animated version actually takes the connection one step further. Not only does Kame-sen’nin share the same character design as the God of Dr. Slump, he also shares the same voice actor! Kohei Miyauchi, who had previously voiced God in the Dr. Slump - Arale-chan anime, was also cast as the voice of Kame-sen’nin.
You’re So Punny
In Dragon Ball chapter 210, Goku’s first test is to make Kaio laugh, which is no easy task considering his penchant for lame puns. However, Goku comes through with the joke, “Futon ga futtonda!” (“My futon blew away!”)
Believe it or not, this is actually not new...or Toriyama’s invention. It was first used in Dr. Slump chapter 216, “Unidentified Flying Object,” where a “Dr. Umashika” uses it to disarm the “UFO” terrorizing Penguin Village (actually just an invisible kid with a hard candy). It’s also not Toriyama’s; when he uses it in Dr. Slump, he specifically credits the “really dumb gag” to fellow cartoonist Masakazu Katsura.
As stated previously, the character of God in Dr. Slump is also big on these old-man puns, and this trait is passed on to Kaio himself in Dragon Ball. Perhaps there’s just something about divinity that brings out a love for silly wordplay...?
Flushed Away
Toriyama has always been one for toilet humor... and there’s one gag in particular involving a toilet that he actually repeats. Would-be space pirate King Nikochan the Great is searching for a way back to his own planet, when he happens upon Senbe’s toilet and assumes it is a device that can send him back home. Meanwhile, Kame-Sen’nin’s attempt at perverted antics with Bulma’s Microband backfire badly, as he gets flushed away. Both of them emerge from the nearby septic tank, distinctly malodorous and decidedly nonplussed.
Familiar Cars
Oh hey, look! Taro and Peasuke are taking Bulma’s Renault 5 Turbo out for a spin. And Senbe’s hard at work on the Pilaf Gang’s Autobianchi A112. And Arale is driving Yamcha’s Fiat-Abarth 695...? What...?
You know how there’s the phrase, “write what you know”? Toriyama’s motto might as well be “draw what you like.” It started when he was a kid, where he would draw things that he wanted until he either got them or lost interest, and his body of work as an adult shows that this never changed. His interests (in this case, cars) are reflected as-is in the pages of his manga, and he happens to like these three models quite a bit indeed. He even had an A112 of his own, detailed with “STUDIO UCCELLO” (“Bird Studio” in Italian) on the side!
JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) is one of the translators for Kanzenshuu. He lives with his family in Japan.
Dragon Ball in Jump
Exploring history’s “rough draft” of Akira Toriyama’s magnum opus: Weekly Jump issues
By Julian Grybowski
I have a confession to make: despite having lived in Japan for years now, and despite being a regular reader of Weekly Shonen Jump when it comes to current series, I had little interest in looking up Dragon Ball in issues of yore. This largely came down to practicality—where does one put 517 issues of a phonebook-sized magazine?—and probably a bit of fan-snobbery, as well. After all, we already had the entire series in pristine quality thanks to the kanzenban, right? One needn’t look any further. But perhaps one should.
I have Peking Duck to thank for my change of heart. When Japan’s #1 Dragon Ball collector made it known that he had the entire series’ run at his disposal, he also did something else unprecedented: he made Toriyama’s weekly comments from each issue available to the public, at first on Twitter, and later in book form, printed at his own expense. These comments are a window into Toriyama’s world, and collected together, they tie a decade of seemingly meaningless observations into the outline of an individual: his habits, his likes and dislikes, and the things that shape his work, laid out in plain sight week by week. Sometimes they’re relevant to the series, and sometimes not, but they are the kind of knowledge we at Kanzenshuu ache to share with the world’s fans. With his permission, we made translating them a top priority.
I visited Peking Duck’s house outright in 2013 to help prepare for the HokoTate auditions, and my experience there motivated me further to seek out the magazines the only place I knew at the time: the library. These helped me fill in the gaps in data that Heath had been collecting over years, but the hours spent there also impressed upon me both the value of the magazine as a source of information (including things that never made it into the guidebooks, like Bulma’s birthday or the backstories of Coola’s minions), and the uniqueness of the series when viewed in Jump itself.
It’s not just that the series is still in motion from week to week with possibilities not yet realized, but each chapter itself is still in-progress, so to speak: extra text hypes current contests or encourages the reader to check out the latest episode of the TV show. Toriyama’s own color art is embellished with extra splashes supplied by Shueisha. And, most intriguingly, sometimes things are different from the collected release. Characters get misnamed, like General White (“General Silver” in chapters 63 and 64) or Videl (“Devil” in Chapter 425), and there is the occasional typo. And then there are the things that never needed correcting.
Until I’d seen Dragon Ball firsthand in Weekly Jump, I had thought that the kanzenban was truly “perfection” for the series. While I still agree that it’s by far the best release in any language, my opinion of it is less favorable than it once was. First, there’s the art. While considerable effort is spent to make the series look really good (high-quality paper, great contrast, intact color chapters), it sometimes goes too far.
I’m not just talking about taking away the taglines from the title pages: much more troubling is its tendency to try and “fix” things. Shuu’s name is changed to “Soba” in Chapter 110, matching his first appearance, but orphaning Mai’s name pun. The date of the Cell Games is changed to Dragon Ball Z’s “May 26th” rather than the manga’s original (and perplexing) “M. 17th”. Art errors early on, such as a stray “Turtle” emblem on Kuririn’s monk robes in Chapter 53, and Goku in his training clothes before he changes into them in Chapter 24, are carefully “corrected.” And title pages for which the color originals were seemingly lost, such as for chapters 5 and 86, are redrawn digitally rather than scanned from an extant copy of the magazine itself.
And despite this tendency to try and smooth over inconsistencies that no one ever complained about (and which would have been fodder for jokes in Dr. Slump), the kanzenban still misses a ton. The original title page for Chapter 12 has never been reprinted since it ran in Jump back in 1985. Trunks still warns Goku of Artific
ial Humans “19” and “20” despite only knowing of 17 and 18. The original title pages of Chapters 19 and 44, once spared from oblivion as the covers of tankobon volumes 2 and 4, are omitted completely (and in the latter case, actually replaced by a complete fabrication using different artwork).
All this might sound like fanboy whining, and I suppose to an extent it is. I’ve certainly caught flak from some fans who think pointing out mistakes like these, whether by Toriyama or by the publishers, amounts to a kind of heresy, or at least trying to ruin others’ fun. But hear me out: once you’re exposed to Dragon Ball in Jump, it’s hard not to see the manga as something alive. Akira Toriyama toiled on this for over ten years, one week at a time, but he was never as methodical or painstakingly precise as the kanzenban tries (and fails) to make it appear. Rather than the product of careful plotting, Dragon Ball is the distillation of the author’s creative energies, and these more recent attempts to “perfect” it after the fact take away from that. You don’t respect the series by taking what was once alive and draining it of that vitality until it becomes inert. Instead, you should embrace its faults and its imperfections, letting it jump off the page of its own accord, no less