Dragon Ball: How One Manga Defined What Action Means Globally
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
I want to tell you about a specific Wednesday in the mid-1980s.
I was approximately ten years old. Every week, the new issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump arrived at the neighbourhood newsstand, and every week, my reading of the issue followed a specific sequence: I checked the table of contents to confirm that Dragon Ball was in the issue (it almost always was), turned to the Dragon Ball chapter first, read it, and then — sometimes — read the rest of the magazine.
The chapter was typically sixteen to twenty pages. Reading it took approximately eight minutes. Those eight minutes were among the most anticipated and most satisfying eight minutes of my week.
I am describing this experience not to indulge nostalgia — though the nostalgia is genuine — but because I think it captures something specific about what Dragon Ball was and why it mattered: it was the thing you could not wait to read, the story whose next development you thought about between installments, the world you wanted to be inside for longer than the chapter allowed.
Across the four decades since those Wednesday afternoons, Dragon Ball has become one of the most significant cultural exports in Japanese history, generating a franchise worth approximately 24 billion dollars in merchandise alone and producing, in the generation of creators who grew up reading it, an influence that is visible in virtually every major action manga and action anime produced since.
What Dragon Ball Is
Dragon Ball is a manga by Akira Toriyama, serialised in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995 across 519 chapters — one of the longest serialisations in Jump’s history and one of the most commercially significant manga publications in the medium’s history.
The series began as a comic adventure story heavily influenced by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West: a young boy named Son Goku — who has a monkey tail and superhuman strength and lives alone in a forest — encounters the teenager Bulma, who is searching for the seven legendary Dragon Balls that, when collected, summon the dragon Shenron who grants a wish.
This early Dragon Ball — the first several arcs, before the series shifts toward pure combat — is genuinely funny and genuinely charming: Toriyama’s specific comedy sensibility, his character designs, and the specific energy of a story that is primarily about adventure and discovery rather than combat. Goku’s naivety and his extraordinary physical capability are played for comedy as often as for drama.
The shift came with the introduction of the Tenkaichi Budokai (World Martial Arts Tournament) and the subsequent escalation of threats that required escalating power. By the time the series transformed into Dragon Ball Z — the anime designation for the manga’s second major arc, beginning with the arrival of the Saiyan warriors — the series had become primarily a combat manga, with the comedy subordinated to increasingly dramatic battles with increasingly powerful opponents.
The Innovations: What Dragon Ball Created
Dragon Ball’s influence on action manga and anime is so thoroughgoing that it is difficult to identify specific innovations — the conventions it established have become so universal that they are now simply the conventions of the genre, no longer recognisably Toriyama’s inventions.
But the conventions are Toriyama’s inventions, or the first widely influential deployments of approaches that became standard:
Power scaling as narrative engine. The specific mechanism of Dragon Ball Z — the escalation of power levels across increasingly powerful opponents, each requiring the protagonist to discover new capabilities — has become the template for action manga progression. Every shōnen protagonist who achieves a new power form in a critical moment is drawing on the structure that Dragon Ball Z established. The Super Saiyan transformation — Goku’s golden-haired, dramatically amplified power state, introduced in the Frieza arc — is the archetype that every subsequent manga power upgrade implicitly references.
The training arc. Dragon Ball’s consistent use of extended training sequences — periods in which the protagonist and their companions work to develop new capabilities in preparation for upcoming threats — became a standard narrative structure for action manga. The hyperbolic time chamber (a space where one year passes for every day in the outside world) is the most explicit deployment of this device, but the underlying narrative logic — the reader accepting that the protagonist will become more powerful, and the series needing to provide a mechanism for that power increase — became universal.
The tournament arc. The World Martial Arts Tournament, recurring throughout Dragon Ball, is the archetype for the competition arc that appears in virtually every subsequent action manga. The specific pleasures of the tournament format — the bracket structure, the variety of opponents with distinct fighting styles, the elimination drama — were established by Dragon Ball and have been reproduced in Naruto, My Hero Academia, Hunter x Hunter, Jujutsu Kaisen, and essentially every action manga of consequence.
Visual impact over tactical complexity. Dragon Ball’s combat is not primarily strategic — it does not reward the reader who carefully tracks the specific mechanics of each fighter’s abilities and predicts the outcome of each engagement. It rewards the reader who responds to visual impact, to the specific energy of a dramatic hit or a transformation sequence. This aesthetic — prioritising the experience of combat over the puzzle of combat — became the dominant mode of shōnen action, and the more strategic alternatives (Yu Yu Hakusho, Hunter x Hunter) are defined partly by their departure from the Dragon Ball default.
Akira Toriyama: The Creator
Akira Toriyama is, by commercial impact, the most significant manga creator in the history of the medium. Dragon Ball’s global commercial reach — the merchandise, the games, the films, the various sequel series — has generated revenues that no other manga property has matched.
Toriyama’s artistic style — clean, expressive character designs with clear silhouettes and specific body language; backgrounds that suggest environments efficiently without overworking; action that reads clearly and dynamically — became one of the most imitated visual styles in the history of comics. The specific way Toriyama draws a fight — the staging of impacts, the use of speed lines, the specific facial expressions of characters under physical strain — has been absorbed into the visual vocabulary of action manga so completely that it is no longer specifically Toriyama’s but simply the way that action looks in manga.
Beyond Dragon Ball, Toriyama created the character designs for the Dragon Quest video game series — making him responsible for the visual design of two of the most commercially successful franchises in entertainment history simultaneously, a combination that has no parallel in any other creative field.
Toriyama died in March 2024, at the age of 68. The response in Japan and internationally was extraordinary — the specific quality of the grief expressed was the grief for someone who had been part of millions of people’s childhoods, whose work had been a significant presence in the lives of people who had never met him but who felt his absence immediately and specifically.
The Wednesday afternoons of my childhood — the eight minutes with the new Dragon Ball chapter — are a specific kind of memory. Toriyama made them possible.
The Legacy: What Dragon Ball Built
The specific legacy of Dragon Ball in the international understanding of anime is worth being explicit about.
Dragon Ball Z — broadcast internationally through the 1990s and 2000s, reaching audiences in Europe, the Americas, Southeast Asia, and beyond — was, for many international viewers, the first anime they encountered. The specific experience of encountering animated combat at the scale and the intensity of Dragon Ball Z — the extended battles, the dramatic power escalations, the specific emotional stakes of fights between characters you had spent hundreds of episodes caring about — was, for many people, a revelation about what animation could do.
The creators who grew up watching Dragon Ball Z — who are now making the anime and games and comics of the contemporary moment — carry its influence explicitly. Characters reach back to it. Power systems reference it. The specific shape of a dramatic battle — the buildup, the apparent defeat, the recovery, the final clash — is a shape that Dragon Ball Z established in the minds of a generation of creators.
The franchise continues: Dragon Ball Super extended the story; theatrical films including Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018) and Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (2022) demonstrated that the franchise retains genuine creative energy as well as commercial momentum.
But the core achievement is the original — the Wednesday afternoons, the specific energy of Toriyama at his peak, the specific pleasure of a story that wanted nothing more than to be the best possible version of what it was.
— Yoshi 🐉 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Osamu Tezuka: The God of Manga Who Changed Everything” and “The History of Anime: From Astro Boy to Global Phenomenon” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
