Dragon Ball (Japanese: ドラゴンボール Hepburn: Doragon Bōru) is a Japanese media franchise created by Akira Toriyama in 1984. The initial manga, written and illustrated by Toriyama, was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995, with the 519 individual chapters collected into 42 tankōbon volumes by its publisher Shueisha. Dragon Ball was initially inspired by the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, as well as Hong Kong martial arts films. The series follows the adventures of the protagonist, Son Goku, from his childhood through adulthood as he trains in martial arts and explores the world in search of the seven orbs known as the Dragon Balls, which summon a wish-granting dragon when gathered. Along his journey, Goku makes several friends and battles a wide variety of villains, many of whom also seek the Dragon Balls.

Toriyama's manga was adapted and divided into two anime series produced by Toei Animation: Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, which together were broadcast in Japan from 1986 to 1996. Additionally, the studio has developed 20 animated feature films and three television specials, as well as two anime sequel series titled Dragon Ball GT (1996–1997) and Dragon Ball Super (2015–2018). From 2009 to 2015, a revised version of Dragon Ball Z aired in Japan under the title Dragon Ball Kai, as a recut that follows the manga's story more faithfully by removing most of the material featured exclusively in the anime. Several companies have developed various types of merchandising based on the series leading to a large media franchise that includes films, both animated and live-action, collectible trading card games, numerous action figures, along with several collections of soundtracks and numerous video games. Dragon Ball is one of the top twenty highest-grossing media franchises of all time, having generated more than $20 billion in total franchise revenue as of 2018.[1]

Since its release, Dragon Ball has become one of the most successful manga and anime series of all time, with the manga sold in over 40 countries and the anime broadcast in more than 80 countries. The manga's 42 collected tankōbon volumes have sold over 160 million copies in Japan, and are estimated to have sold more 250–300 million copies worldwide, making it the second best-selling manga series in history, behind only One Piece. Reviewers have praised the art, characterization, and humour of the story. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential manga series ever made, with many manga artists citing Dragon Ball as a source of inspiration for their own now popular works. The anime, particularly Dragon Ball Z, is also highly popular across the world and is considered one of the most influential in boosting the popularity of Japanese animation in Western culture. It has had a considerable impact on global popular culture, referenced by and inspiring numerous artists, athletes, celebrities, filmmakers, musicians and writers across the world.

Akira Toriyama loosely modeled Dragon Ball on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West;[3][4] but also redeveloped it from his 1983 one-shot manga Dragon Boy.[4] He has said that the fighting was influenced from movies by famous martial arts actor Jackie Chan,[5][6] and Hong Kong martial arts films such as Enter the Dragon and Drunken Master,[7] as he wanted to create a story with the basic theme of Journey to the West, but with "a little kung fu."[8]

Since it was serialized in a shōnen magazine, he added the idea of the Dragon Balls to give it a game-like activity of gathering something, without thinking of what the characters would wish for.[8] With Goku being Sun Wukong, Bulma as Tang Sanzang, Oolong as Zhu Bajie and Yamcha being Sha Wujing, he originally thought it would last about a year or end once the Dragon Balls were collected.[6][9] Toriyama stated that although the stories are purposefully easy to understand, he specifically aimed Dragon Ball at readers older than those of his previous serial Dr. Slump.[10] He also wanted to break from the Western influences common in Dr. Slump, deliberately going for Chinese scenery, referencing Chinese buildings and photographs of China his wife had bought.[11] Toriyama wanted to set Dragon Ball in a fictional world largely based on Asia, taking inspiration from several Asian cultures including Japanese, Chinese, South Asian, Central Asian, Arabic and Indonesian cultures.[12] The island where the Tenkaichi Budōkai (天下一武道会, lit. "Strongest Under the Heavens Martial Arts Tournament") is held is modeled after Bali (in Indonesia), which he, his wife and assistant visited in mid-1985, and for the area around Bobbidi's spaceship he consulted photos of Africa.[11]

During the early chapters of the manga Toriyama's editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, commented that Goku looked rather plain, so to combat this he added several characters like Kame-Sen'nin and Kuririn, and created the Tenkaichi Budōkai martial arts tournament to focus the storyline on fighting. It was when the first Tenkaichi Budōkai began that Dragon Ball truly became popular, having recalled the races and tournaments in Dr. Slump.[6] Anticipating that readers would expect Goku to win the tournaments, Toriyama had him lose the first two while planning an eventual victory. He said that Muscle Tower in the Red Ribbon Army storyline was inspired by the video game Spartan X, in which enemies tended to appear very fast. He then created Piccolo Daimao as a truly evil villain, and as a result called that arc the most interesting to draw.[6]

Once Goku and company had become the strongest on Earth, they turned to extraterrestrial opponents including the Saiyans (サイヤ人 Saiya-jin); and Goku himself was retconned from an Earthling to a Saiyan who was sent to Earth as a baby.[13] Frieza, who forcibly took over planets to resell them, was created around the time of the Japanese economic bubble and was inspired by real estate speculators, whom Toriyama called the "worst kind of people."[6] Finding the escalating enemies difficult, he created the Ginyu Force to add more balance to the series. When Toriyama created the Super Saiyan (超スーパーサイヤ人 Sūpā Saiya-jin) transformation during the Frieza arc, he was initially concerned that Goku's facial expressions as a Super Saiyan made him look like a villain, but decided it was acceptable since the transformation was brought about by anger.[14] He added time travel next during the Cell arc, but said he had a hard time with it, only thinking of what to do that week and having to discuss it with his second editor Yu Kondo.[6] After Cell's death, Toriyama intended for Gohan to replace Goku as the series' protagonist, but felt the character was not suited for the role and changed his mind.[6]

Going against the normal convention that the strongest characters should be the largest in terms of physical size, he designed many of Dragon Ball's most powerful characters with small statures, including the protagonist, Goku.[15] Toriyama later explained that he had Goku grow up as a means to make drawing fight scenes easier, even though his first editor Kazuhiko Torishima was initially against it because it was rare to have the main character of a manga series change drastically.[16] When including fights in the manga, Toriyama had the characters go to uninhabited locations to avoid difficulties in drawing residents and destroyed buildings.[11] Toriyama said that he did not plan the details of the story, resulting in strange occurrences and discrepancies later in the series, including changing the colors of the characters mid-story and few characters having screentone because he found it difficult to use.[5][8][9][17] Since the completion of Dragon Ball, Toriyama has continued to add to its story, mostly background information on its universe, through guidebooks published by Shueisha.

During the second half of the series, Toriyama has said that he had become more interested in coming up with the story than actually drawing it, and that the battles became more intense with him simplifying the lines.[5] In 2013, he stated that because Dragon Ball is an action manga the most important aspect is the sense of speed, so he did not draw very elaborate, going so far as to suggest one could say that he was not interested in the art.[16] He also once said that his goal for the series was to tell an "unconventional and contradictory" story.[15] In 2013, commenting on Dragon Ball's global success, Toriyama said, "Frankly, I don't quite understand why it happened. While the manga was being serialized, the only thing I wanted as I kept drawing was to make Japanese boys happy.", "The role of my manga is to be a work of entertainment through and through. I dare say I don't care even if [my works] have left nothing behind, as long as they have entertained their readers."[18]

Dragon Ball is one of the most popular manga series of all time, and it continues to enjoy high readership today. Dragon Ball is credited as one of the main reasons manga circulation was at its highest between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.[128][129] During Dragon Ball's initial run in Weekly Shōnen Jump, the manga magazine reached an average circulation of 6.53 million weekly sales, the highest in its history.[128][130][129] During Dragon Ball's serialisation between 1984 and 1995, Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine had a total circulation of over 2.9 billion copies,[131][g] with those issues generating an estimated ¥554 billion ($6.9 billion) in sales revenue.[g]

Dragon Ball also sold a record number of collected tankōbon volumes for its time. By 2000, more than 126 million tankōbon copies had been sold in Japan alone.[132] It sold over 150 million copies in Japan by 2008, making it the best-selling manga ever at the time.[133] By 2012, its sales in Japan had grown to pass 156 million, making it the second best-selling Weekly Shōnen Jump manga of all time, behind One Piece.[134] Dragon Ball's tankobon volumes sold 159.5 million copies in Japan by February 2014,[135] and have sold over 160 million copies in Japan as of 2016.[101]

The manga is similarly popular overseas, having been translated and released in over 40 countries worldwide.[136] Estimates for the total number of tankōbon volumes sold worldwide range from more than 250 million copies[137][138][101][139][140][141][142][143][144] to more than 300 million copies,[1][145][146][147][148][149] not including unofficial pirated copies; when including pirated copies, an estimated total of over 400 million official and unofficial copies have been sold worldwide.[f][c]

For the 10th anniversary of the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2006, Japanese fans voted Dragon Ball the third greatest manga of all time.[150] In a survey conducted by Oricon in 2007 among 1,000 people, Son Goku, the main character of the franchise, ranked first place as the "Strongest Manga Character of All Time."[151] Goku's journey and his ever-growing strength resulted in the character winning "the admiration of young boys everywhere".[3] Manga artists, such as One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda and Naruto creator Masashi Kishimoto, have stated that Goku inspired their series' main protagonists as well as series structure.[152][153]

Manga critic Jason Thompson stated in 2011 that "Dragon Ball is by far the most influential shonen manga of the last 30 years, and today, almost every Shonen Jump artist lists it as one of their favorites and lifts from it in various ways."[154] He says the series "turns from a gag/adventure manga to an nearly-pure fighting manga",[154] and its basic formula of "lots of martial arts, lots of training sequences, a few jokes" became the model for other shōnen series, such as Naruto.[155] Thompson also called Toriyama's art influential and cited it as a reason for the series' popularity.[154] James S. Yadao, author of The Rough Guide to Manga, claims that the first several chapters of Dragon Ball "play out much like Saiyuki with Dr. Slump-like humour built in" and that Dr. Slump, Toriyama's previous manga, has a clear early influence on the series.[156] He feels the series "established its unique identity" after the first occasion when Goku's group disbands and he trains under Kame-sen'nin, when the story develops "a far more action-packed, sinister tone" with "wilder" battles with aerial and spiritual elements and an increased death count, while humor still makes an occasional appearance.[156] Yadao claims that an art shift occurs when the characters "lose the rounded, innocent look that he established in Dr. Slump and gain sharper angles that leap off the page with their energy and intensity."[157]

Animerica felt the series had "worldwide appeal", using dramatic pacing and over-the-top martial arts action to "maintain tension levels and keep a crippler crossface hold on the audience's attention spans".[158] In Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture, Takashi Murakami commented that Dragon Ball's "never-ending cyclical narrative moves forward plausibly, seamlessly, and with great finesse."[132] Ridwan Khan from Animefringe.com commented that the manga had a "chubby" art style, but as the series continued the characters got more refined, leaner, and more muscular. Khan prefers the manga over the slow pacing of the anime counterparts.[159] Allen Divers of Anime News Network praised the story and humor of the manga as being very good at conveying all of the characters' personalities. Divers also called Viz's translation one of the best of all the English editions of the series due to its faithfulness to the original Japanese.[160] D. Aviva Rothschild of Rationalmagic.com remarked the first manga volume as "a superior humor title". They praised Goku's innocence and Bulma's insistence as one of the funniest parts of the series.[161]

The content of the manga has been controversial in the United States. In November 1999, Toys "R" Us removed Viz's Dragon Ball from their stores nationwide when a Dallas parent complained the series had "borderline soft porn" after he bought them for his four-year-old son.[162] Commenting on the issue, Susan J. Napier explained it as a difference in culture.[162] After the ban, Viz reluctantly began to censor the series to keep wide distribution.[163] However, in 2001, after releasing three volumes censored, Viz announced Dragon Ball would be uncensored and reprinted due to fan reactions.[163] In October 2009, Wicomico County Public Schools in Maryland banned the Dragon Ball manga from their school district because it "depicts nudity, sexual contact between children and sexual innuendo among adults and children."[162]

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