Dragon Ball

Son Goku, a small boy with a tail and improbable strength, meets a girl searching for seven scattered orbs that summon a wish-granting dragon. The early volumes are a comic adventure loosely modelled on the Chinese novel Journey to the West.

Over its run the series shifts almost entirely into martial arts tournaments and then into escalating battles against increasingly powerful opponents, and the wish-granting premise recedes.

It begins as a comedy about finding some magic marbles and ends as the blueprint for thirty years of action manga.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

His character and object design is the series' most durable contribution: clean shapes, immediately legible silhouettes, vehicles and creatures that are funny and functional at once.

He came from a design background rather than a comics one, and the clarity shows. A Toriyama character is recognisable in outline at any size, which is part of why the property merchandised so successfully.

The World Martial Arts Tournament arcs established a shape that the entire genre adopted: a bracket, an escalating series of opponents, and a clear measure of relative strength.

It solves a genuine storytelling problem by supplying stakes, structure and a schedule, and it is the single most copied device in the medium.

Each antagonist must exceed the last, which produces the series' signature problem: power levels inflate until earlier threats become trivial and the numbers stop meaning anything.

Toriyama was open about improvising, and the series repeatedly solves the problem by introducing a new transformation or a stronger enemy — a pattern now so standard that it has its own vocabulary.

The early volumes are broadly, sometimes crudely funny, with slapstick, running gags and a great deal of toilet humour.

The comic register never entirely disappears, and the series is considerably lighter than its reputation among readers who know only the later fighting arcs. Toriyama's gag timing is genuinely good, and several early volumes work as straight comedy with fighting attached.

Toriyama's action is exceptionally legible: clear spatial relationships, strong silhouettes, and impacts drawn so that the reader always understands what connected with what.

The clarity is the craft. Later series inherited the escalation without always inheriting the readability, and the comparison is usually unflattering to them.

He is cheerful, uninterested in power for its own sake, and motivated almost entirely by wanting to fight stronger opponents rather than by justice.

The simplicity is deliberate. He is not a moral centre and the series does not ask him to be, which distinguishes him from most of the protagonists who followed.

The series turned its publisher's weekly magazine into an enormous business and established the pattern by which a successful manga becomes an animated series, a film programme, a game franchise and a merchandising operation.

The industrial model that anime now runs on was substantially shaped by what this property demonstrated was possible.

The treatment is poor. Female characters are consistently sidelined once the fighting becomes serious, and the early volumes contain a persistent strand of sexual harassment played for laughs.

This is a genuine limitation rather than a matter of taste, and it is the element most likely to stop a new reader.

The final stretch is where the series is most influential and least disciplined, with long fights, frequent power inflation and plotting that is visibly being invented weekly.

Many readers prefer the first half; most of the imitation descends from the second. Toriyama has said he repeatedly tried to end the series and was asked to continue, which explains a good deal about its shape.

English publication has appeared in several formats, including a two-part split that separated the early adventure from the later fighting, which confuses newcomers. The complete series is available in large three-in-one volumes that restore the original sequence.

Reading it as one continuous work is strongly preferable, since the shift in register is part of what makes the series interesting.

Readers who want to see where the modern action manga came from, and readers who enjoy comic adventure and are willing to follow it into something different.

It is long, and it is not necessary to finish it to understand its importance. The first tournament arc alone demonstrates most of what the series contributed, and the early comedy is genuinely charming in a way the later volumes are not.