MANGA SCENE
A GUIDE TO
JAPANESE COMICS
AND ANIMATION
BOTH PAST AND
PRESENT
PLAY BALL!
By Carl Gustav Horn
Manga monster
'Dragon Ball' preps for
a March U.S. invasion
F.Y.I.
In the Kingdom of the Funnybook, it might
be hard to dispute Dragon Ball's claim to
the throne.
Over 135 million copies of Akira
Toriyama's Dragon Ball have been sold in
Japan. Like some comic book Godzilla, the
series crushed all in its wake, spawning a
endless series of anime, action figures, toys
and video games. When the animated
"Dragon Ball Z" came to America, it quickly
became the nation's most popular cartoon
show. Dragon Ball may well be just as well-
loved in Europe as it is in Japan, making it
more than probable that Dragon Ball is the
most popular comic book in the entire world.
Now, the comic book is coming to
America in two very different flavors: Dragon
Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Both titles, debuting
in March, are seperate parts of the same
Japanese comic and tell the epic story of Goku,
a superpowered, monkey-tailed boy. The two
concurrent Dragon Ball story arcs, housed in
]their serperate monthly titles, enable the reader
to see hero Goku at the two most important
stages in his life--without having to wait years
to do so, as the original Japanese audiences did.
Dragon Ball revolves around young Goku's
encounter with a girl named Bulma and their
subsequent quest to find the seven mystical
"Dragon Balls." These artifacts, when
recovered and combined, can summon a great
dragon to grant a wish. Dragon Ball Z flashes
the story ahead to a grown-up Goku, whose
youthful fun has been put aside for a campaign
of endless martial-arts battles against magical
mosters and conquering aliens.
"Toriyama's genius, and therefor his
success, lies in his ability to combine a sense
of fantasy adventure and humor with
characters [who are] each distinctly their own
person," says Viz Editor-in-Chief Satoru Fujii.
In fact, every single thing, be it person, hill or
dune buggy, in a Toriyama manga, is a
character. Whereas many "realistic" manga
stories today place their inhabitants in layouts
filled with traced photographs of cities and
cars, Toriyama approaches comic books by
never forgetting he has the right to be a
cartoonist and portray anything any way he
sees fit. In Dragon Ball, which ran in Japan from
1985 to 1995, the result is continually quirky
and unique; with Toriyama, American manga
fans are getting a kind of wild freedom in
drawing (with the skill to exploit it to its
fullest) not seen here before.
Before its sterling art, Dragon Ball
strikes a chord in a very familiar arena. Viz
Associate Editor James Teal certainly thinks
it's valid to view Goku as a superhero, and
solid paralles can be drawn between Goku
and American icon Superman. Both are
aliens, were sent to earth as small children
to escape the destruction of their homeworlds
and pssess similar superpowers (flight and
super-strength).
But Goku's a refreshing kind of
superhero. In one sense, his pure-hearted
nature and optimistic strength of character
puts him in tune with the recent creative
backlash in American comics against dark,
obsession-driven vigilantes. On the other
hand, though, Goku goes up against the
mold of traditional U.S. superheroes in that
his interest doesn't lie in protecting society
per se, but only in overcomming the challenge
of each antagonist he meets, so that he can
move onto the next challenge. And the moral
code he expresses to his enemies is that they
should do the same. His defeated foes often
join up with him in spirit, and when Goku shows
mercy, it's with the condition that his enemy
trains harder so they can fight once again!
This philosophy makes Dragon Ball
a fascinating departure from American comics
and their ideas about superheroes: that there
must be conflict between the powers and the
person who has them, and the superpowers
are either of no real help to heroes unhappy
in their personal lives, or superpowers will
actually make a hero's personal life worse.
The notion in Dragon Ball that superpowers
are a tool for personal growth seems almost
radical; divorced from a mission to help
society, Dragon Ball's heroes can use their
powers to help themselves. It's a thought-
provoking application of traditional martial-arts
ethics on the superhuman scale.
It's not likely these comics will sink like
a stone in America's waters. With a beautifully
rendered world, an interesting hero and a
unique perspective on the nature of heroism
and a hero's abilities, Dragon Ball might go as
far in America as it has in the rest of the world.
And then some.
_____________________________________
Cyberpunk and fashion victim Carl Horn
exists in the state of Euphoria. Or California.
____________________________
Why are there two names for the
manga series? In Japan, the entire
42-volume story was known under
the name Dragon Ball. However, the
two parts of the anime show based
on the manga distiguished
themselves by adding a "Z" to the
second part. Viz comics has
decided to use the two different
TV names to better distinguish each
manga title. The Viz English-
language version will be published
in the right-to-left format of the
original art, as is standard for
Japanese comics. Both Dragon Ball
and Dragon Ball Z will be published
monthly at a price of $2.95, with
32 black-and-white pages each.