Dragon Ball

Dragon Ball started as Akira Toriyama's loose riff on Journey to the West, the classical Chinese novel about a monkey king on a pilgrimage, filtered through his own obsession with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films. Son Goku is a direct descendant of that monkey king archetype: a tail, superhuman strength, and a habit of getting into trouble he mostly punches his way out of. The manga began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984.

The version most people actually picture when they hear the name, the Saiyans, Frieza, Cell, Buu, is technically the sequel. Dragon Ball Z began in 1989, once Toriyama shifted the story from martial arts adventure into the planet-cracking power scaling the franchise became famous for. That shift is also, by most accounts, what standardized the modern shonen power-up formula: training arcs, transformation forms, villains who keep escalating past the last one, a template a huge chunk of the genre still runs on.

Toriyama kept working on the franchise, in various forms, for the rest of his life. Few manga artists get to watch their first serialized work become a permanent fixture of global pop culture. Fewer still keep steering it for four decades.

Dig through what's in stock: Anime Merch · Cards