The Spring 2017 Manga Guide

Dragon Ball Super Vol. 1

What's It About? 

Dragon Ball Super is the latest installment in legendary manga artist Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball franchise. A direct sequel to the original Dragon Ball manga, Toriyama writes the overall plot of Dragon Ball Super, which runs concurrently as a monthly manga and an anime series. The manga is storyboarded and drawn by Toyotarō, who previously wrote the spinoff manga Dragon Ball Heroes: Victory Mission. Following Goku's victory over Majin Boo, he is approached by Beerus, the God of Destruction, who is seeking to challenge a prophesied Super Saiyan God. Beerus nearly destroys the Earth when none of its fighters prove a challenge to him, but after Goku and his friends discover the means to achieve the Super Saiyan God form, Beerus spares the planet, seeing potential in Goku. Goku and Vegeta are then drawn into a conflict between Beerus and his twin brother Champa, the God of Destruction of a parallel universe. Beerus and Champa decide to hold a tournament featuring each of their universe's strongest fighters, with the prize being dominion over Earth.

Dragon Ball Super volume 1 (5/2/2017) is available for $9.99 from Viz Media. The latest chapters of the series are released monthly on the Viz website and the Viz manga app. The anime is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation's website.

Is It Worth Reading?

Amy McNulty

Rating: 2.5 

Dragon Ball Super volume 1 is an action-packed book that gives little latitude to newcomers. True, more long-time and casual fans are likely to pick up the first volume of this decades-later sequel to the long-running original series than complete neophytes, but the “volume 1” on the cover is practically a misnomer, considering how it feels like the middle of a story. Beginning shortly after Son Goku et al. defeated Boo, Goku is briefly relegated to the “normal” life of that of a farmer at the insistence of his wife, Chi-Chi, that he quit fighting and start earning a living for their family. It makes for a nice few pages of gags—super powerful Goku reduced to practicing fighting during his labor breaks—but is quickly pushed aside as Hercule rewards him with a fortune (Hercule's prize for supposedly saving the Earth himself), freeing Goku to follow his heart's desire and devote himself to training and fighting once more. That's what the volume largely consists of—although that's no shocker, considering the parent series. Nonetheless, so much is crammed into this volume—the introduction of a new intergalactic threat, Goku's quick win over of said new nemesis, and the devising of a new inter-dimensional battle tournament that begins before the volume is over—there's barely a moment to enjoy a single plot point before it's gone. So much seems to happen off-screen—at one point, a note advises the reader to check out one of the movies to see the rest of the scene—or is dumped in a couple of panels of information that it constantly feels like something is missing. It's unnecessarily complex at times and disappointingly shallow at others. In one instance, the Saiyans discover they can power up if they have six Saiyans present but have only five. The narration casually tosses out that Videl is pregnant with a sixth and within a handful of panels, Goku's achieved the next stage of evolution through everyone joining hands. Still, there are moments of humor that break up the action pleasantly enough from time to time.

The battles are easily the highlight of the volume and each punch is drawn to pop right off the page. Toyotarō's art style is so close to Akira Toriyama's as to be virtually indistinguishable. Unfortunately, the Saiyans’ transformations are difficult to tell apart in black and white, though. Dragon Ball Super will have no problem attracting readers, especially since it's written by the creator Toriyama himself, but it has less to offer people new to the series than it does devoted fans and even then, it's still maddeningly rushed.

Nik Freeman

Rating: 1.5

I have never encountered a manga so dead set on convincing me to stop reading it. Dragon Ball Super is strewn with glossed-over details and skipped plot points that it's practically screaming at you to put the book down and watch the anime instead. Almost as payback for all those jokes over the years about how stretched out the Dragon Ball Z anime could be, Dragon Ball Super condenses the story for the manga down to a ridiculous extent. Everything that isn't a fight scene or a joke is raced past without regard for pacing or setup. It reads like a supercut of the anime, highlighting all the exciting parts while leaving out the build that would make them truly memorable moments. When the same happens to important plot elements, they read like the summaries to bad fanfiction rather than ideas that came from Toriyama himself. ‘Dragon Balls the size of planets’ is not a concept that should be introduced without a proper sense of gravitas.

The explanation for how Goku and his friends discover the secret behind the Super Saiyan God form comes in rapid-fire narration. The Resurrection F saga, which lasts thirteen episodes in the anime and covers among many other things how Goku and Vegeta achieve the next evolution of the God transformation, Super Saiyan Blue, is skipped entirely and instead covered by even more narration. If you want to see what happened, go watch the anime, or the Resurrection ‘F’ movie. That's really what the manga is: an advertisement for the show. It cannot and should not be expected to stand on its own. It lacks substance specifically because so much of its substance had to be stripped away in order for the monthly manga series to keep pace with the weekly anime, which is an unreasonable demand to make anyway.

The most frustrating aspect of Dragon Ball Super is that it clearly has the potential to be so much better. Toyotarō is a talented artist, and his illustrations are the volume's lone redeeming quality. But his talents are wasted on a manga that not only is not its own entity, but is barely an approximation of the work it ties into. It would be one thing if there were original elements in the Dragon Ball Super manga that set it apart from the anime, or even if it were given time to tell the same story with a different rate of releases. Instead it is entirely supplemental to the anime, a matter that it almost directly acknowledges, which leaves no discernible reason to read it.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 2.5

Here's the big question: how much do you want to see Bulma slap a god of destruction who looks like a sphynx cat across the face for ruining her birthday party? If the answer is “a lot,” you should probably read the first couple chapters of this manga and not much else, because if you aren't a devoted Dragon Ball fan, there isn't much else here for you. Of course, if you do love all things Dragon Ball, this first volume of Dragon Ball Super is decently exciting – picking up after the peace of Earth has been assured by Boo's defeat, Goku is now a farmer, practicing his moves in the apparently vain hope that someday he will be called upon to fight again. His son Goten thinks this might not be strictly necessary – and wife Chichi just wants him to get a job – but Goku can't give it up…and of course it turns out that he's right. Lord Beerus, the aforementioned catlike god, is looking for the Saiyan God, and of course that's got to be Goku. 

Well, eventually. I do like that Goku isn't immediately powered up to god level, although he naturally reaches it before the halfway point of the volume. Now that there's a new threat to the world, and the possibility of baddies getting their mitts on the dragonballs, Goku's got to train, something he likes much better than farming. From here on, Dragon Ball Super becomes another dose of what made the original series so beloved: crazy powers that are never fully leveled up, more muscles than anyone humanoid should have, funny names, and insane battles. (And, of course, Akira Toriyama's brand of humor, which ranges from slapstick to potty, neither of which are bad things.)

So basically for someone who is not a megafan, Dragon Ball Super feels like more of the same. The later chapters are a bit better because they appear to be telling a wholly original story, while the scenes at Bulma's party seem to be a condensation of events from the Battle of the Gods movie, and it definitely feels like we're missing a chunk of the events.

Obviously I'm not the audience this was created for. That doesn't mean that it isn't still a fun read, but fans of the franchise will definitely get a lot more enjoyment out of it than casual readers, especially if it's been a while since you last ran with Goku and his pals.