DB30YEARS: Special Dragon Ball 30th Anniversary Magazine
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it, and before we know it, we become its denizens. That expansion, crossing generations and cultures, continues even now, as the original manga reaches its 30th anniversary. I’m looking forward to Toriyama-sensei’s continued expansion of the “Toriyama World” in the future.
KEI lives in Japan and has been a fan of the series since childhood. He enjoys commenting on the evolving art and music of the series among many other things.
The Essence of Son Goku
A Shonen Archetype
He’s a character all his own. Since Dragon Ball, many other characters have emulated his characteristics, but just who is Son Goku?
By Scott Frerichs
In my formative years, I fell into anime much as any other North American my age would: early morning airings of Voltron, Robotech, and later Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Before the advent of Pokemon, which would quickly become the essential “anime” that most children would inevitably start with, you were likely to be familiar either with magical wands or energy blasts, often (though not necessarily) divided by gender.
While I fell into both camps as a child, I always found myself fascinated with Dragon Ball. Its kooky art aesthetic, its violent action, the serialized plot; these were many angles from which no other animated series in North America even began to approach me from, and I was in love. I found this new form of storytelling to be utterly fascinating and, as I grew older, I would only go on to learn more and more about the series that inevitably introduced me, by and large, to anime culture.
But one essential aspect of Dragon Ball, in almost all its incarnations, has stood out to me as one of the most intriguing and endearing facets of the series: the main character, Son Goku.
Son Goku’s entire character, from top to bottom, was something that I’d never truly encountered as a child. Completely eschewing his instantly recognizable and iconic design, his personality was strikingly and curiously alien to me. A socially bereft, simple-minded, battle obsessed manchild with several times more battle savvy than common sense, and a glutton at that? Commonly in western animation, these sorts of qualities were reserved for brutish villains or comic relief; very rarely, if ever, did a competent protagonist ever exhibit these qualities.
That’s where Son Goku, to me, shines as a main character. He’s a selfish, largely single-minded boy/manchild obsessed with food, battle, and physical self-improvement over everything else in his life. While these characteristics are often typical of a less endearing character, they’re tied together with a sense of childlike wonder and genuine heart that takes these qualities and makes them positive aspects of his personality. You find his obsession with food charming, his reckless ambition empowering, and his obsession with battle invigorating.
If you’re a fervent manga reader/anime watcher, especially within the shonen genre, you have more than likely seen these characteristics in other characters as well. Since Son Goku’s first appearance in 1984, his influence could be felt years after in many manga within the genre to follow. Fans of series such as One Piece, Hunter x Hunter, Toriko, and to a lesser extent Naruto and Fairy Tail, will find striking similarities between these series’ protagonists and with Son Goku, to varying degrees.
Monkey D. Luffy of One Piece fame is perhaps the most immediate, with his simple, uncultured, and frank nature, combined with his lust for both food and battle. Gon of Hunter x Hunter is often lauded as a more realistic interpretation of (what some refer to as) the Goku Type: eternally pure, endlessly dedicated to one task, and someone who began his adventure at a young age. The titular character of Toriko is, in some ways, a hybrid of Son Goku and Kenshiro of Hokuto no Ken, combining Son Goku’s love for food, battle, and his simplicity with the fighting styles and physique of Kenshiro.
His visual aesthetic has also continued to inspire shonen heroes, with both Toriko and Naruto strutting the iconic orange and blue that Son Goku embodied throughout the entire run of Dragon Ball, and Naruto sporting blonde, spikey hair. Masashi Kishimoto, mangaka of Naruto, has openly stated that he drew inspiration from Son Goku in both his design and personality, as has Yoshihiro Togashi concerning Gon’s character.
Whether or not one can say for certain the Akira Toriyama did, in fact, inspire all of these creations and their subsequent protagonists with his own, I will always look to Son Goku as an excellent example of subverting the qualities of the traditional hero protagonist and making his very own, distinct impact on the genre, as well as the medium of anime at large.
SCOTT (“KaiserNeko”) is a member of TeamFourStar and edits their Dragon Ball Z Abridged fan parody series.
Crossover Madness: Cross Epoch
Akira Toriyama and Eiichiro Oda combine forces to release a Dragon Ball x One Piece spectacular
The casts of Dragon Ball and One Piece gather together in small groups in a new fantasy world where Mr. Satan is king, Buggy and Pilaf have joined forces, and Shenlong has a tea party. What else would you expect from these two?
By Greg Werner
As I sat down and read through Toriyama-sensei and Oda-san’s collaborative one-shot Cross Epoch for the first time in a good four years, I started to recall where I was when I first read it on December 25th, 2006. I could picture the scenery, the sounds and even the smells of the busy city around me. Somehow I even remembered precisely the chapter number of One Piece it accompanied that week in Jump (#439). So can someone please tell me...
How did they do that!? How did they use pen, ink and paper to create what I would contend is an honest-to-goodness time machine for my senses?
Those who’ve mastered the art of storytelling have earned a place in history. Their characters will entertain us from one generation to the next creating new memories, forging new friendships and inspiring readers to rise to great challenges. Thirty years is just the start for Dragon Ball and it will continue as long as we dream of wishes.
Greg has run popular DBZ and One piece websites. He writes for Shueisha’s V-Jump magazine in Japan.
You Don’t Forget Your First Love
Making the Transition from Dragon Ball to One Piece
By Alex Kazanas
It’s no secret that I love One Piece. As much as it is a Japanese pop-culture juggernaut, as well as a story that has captured my own heart, it wouldn’t be possible without my first love:
Dragon Ball.
Dragon Ball has occupied my attention, admiration, and affection since the very early days of the Internet. I’d constantly peruse the World Wide Web for all the information I could find, and when the DBZ anime went on hiatus in the United States I had to double my efforts. I needed to find out what happened next! I became a sponge, soaking up everything DB-related I could fine. I’d print out pages upon pages of manga summaries and buy bootlegged fansubbed VHS tapes in an attempt to satiate my never-ending Son Goku-like hunger. In those days, Dragon Ball-related anything was still slim pickings in the States, so I took what I could get. I imported soundtrack CDs and snatched up what I could of the Ani Mayhem Collectible Card Game. I attempted to emulate Toriyama’s art style. I would practice Ryusei Nakao’s iconic Freeza laugh when nobody was around. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I loved Dragon Ball.
I would also watch Dragon Ball whenever I visited family in Greece each summer. The show came on at 7:00 a.m. on ANT1, and sported a rockin’ Greek dubbed version of “Makafushigi Adventure.” It was neat following my favorite show in another language, and I continued to do so whenever I visited. This brings us to the summer of 2002. After Dragon Ball, my cousins continued to watch their morning rounds of cartoons, which was mostly Greek dubbed versions of other shows that were popular in America a few years prior...except for one in particular that stood out. The first thought going through my head was, “Is that guy using THREE swords?” This particular series, called “Drake and the Search for the Treasure,” (which I found out a day later was actually called “One Piece” after some Internet sleuthing) would soon become what Dragon Ball was to me.
Seeing as Dragon Ball had
long ended by the time One Piece came into my life, it wasn’t such a jarring transition. I figured it was a good time to get into something new, and what better way to do it than with something that, for some weird reason, still reminded me of Dragon Ball. It was partially the art style, but mostly it was the tone. It was lighthearted as a whole, but serious when it needed to be. And it was funny! It hit that perfect blend of comedy and action I had come to love with Dragon Ball, while also impressing me with how well the story itself was told. It wasn’t long before I had found out that Dragon Ball was indeed an inspiration for One Piece. Eiichiro Oda cited Toriyama as his hero, and even had an extensive interview with him in the One Piece art book, Color Walk 1. It was suddenly clear to me why I had loved One Piece so immediately: it was the spiritual successor to Dragon Ball!
Since One Piece was nowhere to be found in the U.S. at that time, I began to repeat the motions of when I had gotten into Dragon Ball during that time when it wasn’t easily accessible. Parroting the methods of my younger self, I snatched up whatever One Piece merchandise, soundtracks, art books, and information that I could, and strangely enough, it was even tougher than the earlier days of Dragon Ball. One Piece had virtually no American audience, even when it became