December 3rd, 2019 
Charles Solomon 
Since its modest beginning as a serial in Weekly Shonen Jump 35 years ago, Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular properties in the world. It’s sold more than 250 million books, and has been animated for four TV series, twenty theatrical features, video games, etc. It’s also accounted for billions of dollars in license product sales. (Look around a gym and see how many 20-something guys are working out in Goku tank-tops and T-shirts.) The debut of the latest adventure, Dragon Ball Super in 2015, has only increased its popularity.
A full-color, slip-cased volume, Dragon Ball: A Visual History offers a year by year overview of three and half decades of the manga. Included are full-color reprints of magazine covers, illustrations, posters and the covers of all the original manga collections. It’s as thorough a collection as any fan could hope for, although examples of Toriyama’s sketches and preliminary artwork would have been a interesting addition.
Toriyama insists his favorite drawing of his characters is not one of the fight scenes for which he’s famous, but an off-beat 1990 fold-out poster from Weekly Shonen Jump (reprinted at full size and suitable for framing). Goku, wearing jeans, sneakers and a baseball cap, gleefully rides a motor scooter fitted with mechanical dinosaur legs. His young son Gohan in a out-sized Chinese hat rides behind him.
In the commentaries and reprinted interviews, Toriyama comes across as self-deprecating and sometimes downright odd. (He wears a variety of masks and disguises in almost all his self-caricatures.) He refers to himself as “lazy” and “an awful scatterbrain.”
In a 2013 interview, Toriyama says that he felt the physical proportions of the adult Goku worked better than the initial child version—although his editors’ objected to the idea of redesigning the main character in a series that was gaining in popularity: “It was actually hard to portray fights well with the stumpy child Goku, so I wanted to make him grow up and get taller…my editor and others were firmly opposed to the idea. But it happened nonetheless, and I could draw the new, taller Goku straddling a motorcycle, for instance.”
Toriyama reveals a surprising contrast between his approach to his first hit series “Dr. Slump” and “Dragon Ball:” “Dr. Slump was (meant to be) a rather stylish gag series, so I was particular about the art there, in a few ways, but Dragon Ball was an action title. The most important things was a sense of speed, so I didn’t obsess over the drawings too much…Even now, I don’t find working with Dragon Ball’s motifs to be especially fun.”
Although brightly colored and visually comprehensive, this history tells reader less than it might. It’s time someone translated the less lavish, but encyclopedic Dragon Ball Dictionary, which is only available in French and Japanese, as a companion volume.
That caveat aside, Dragon Ball: A Visual History would make the ideal Christmas gift for any male anime fan between the ages of 12 and 29.
Dragon Ball: A Visual History
By Akira Toriyama
Viz: $34.99, 239 pp.
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