To the surprise of practically nobody that knows me, I've decided to make my first review series a look into Akira Toriyama's classic itself – Dragon Ball! Beginning serialization in 1984, Dragon Ball followed hot on the heels of Toriyama's previous work, Dr. Slump (another series likely to go under the magnifying glass here at some point in the future). You wouldn't guess it from the series nearly non-existent standing here in the US, but Dr. Slump was a massive success back in Japan, and set up Toriyama as one of the biggest names in Weekly Shonen Jump, if not manga itself, very quickly. As you can imagine, a lot was riding on his second major series, and as evidenced by the manga running until 1995, and the longevity of it's popularity world-wide nearly 40 years later, Toriyama delivered in spades. With anime, manga, video games, movies, toys, and even a float in the St. Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone even outside the anime fandom who hasn't at least HEARD of Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball also feels like a very natural starting point for this blog as well. You see, back in the earlier 2000's (and you have no idea how much it pains me to realize how long ago that now is), Dragon Ball was the very first anime I got into. Well, technically I was into Pokemon first, but that was more-so the game. I also had no idea what anime was at the time. But once I got into Dragon Ball, I got into anime itself, and I've been a huge fan ever since. Dragon Ball also shares the distinction of being my very first manga as well – until I saw a volume of it on shelves at a store, I didn't even realize manga was being released in the US! Ah, the innocence of youth. So, Dragon Ball definitely felt like the right choice to tackle first here. The question then becomes 'how' to tackle it exactly. Even before the 2013 revival of the brand with a new, feature length film, the franchise already boasted an enormous amount of material to cover. At the same time however, a bunch of the material is the same story told twice over – the manga came first, and the anime thus adapted it's story to the screen. With my main focus being on covering the story primarily, covering both seemed a bit redundant. At the same time however, there's a lot of great material that only exists outside of the pages of the manga, as well as some lesser-known but still interesting pieces of story that I'd love to talk about as well. So the question now became just how exactly best to go about this. The answer to that question, as I see it, is a little bit unconventional, so stick with me for a moment. Here's the plan of action moving forward:
I think that should just about cover it. I'm still unsure of exactly how often or many posts there will be per day once things get going, or if it even will be daily at all, but very soon we'll be starting things off with the very first chapter of the manga. I hope everyone's looking as forward to it as I am.
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About the AuthorAspiring author and big anime/manga fan, just trying to do my best in the world. For more details, go to About Me. Archives
September 2022
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