Puff Puff

Found a couple early Dragon Ball volumes at a flea market when I was young and read them until the spines cracked. This tiny monkey kid named Goku hunting for magic balls with his girl and an old man—something about it worked. Everything felt possible because you genuinely didn’t know what came next. The discovery was happening on the page at the same time I was discovering it.

Then the series became something else. Increasingly muscular men yelling at each other. Power levels climbing into meaningless numbers. The same fight stretched across thirty episodes. That’s anime’s original disease, and Dragon Ball caught it hard.

The early chapters had actual mystery. Weird creatures that didn’t make sense. The characters fumbling through the world. There was strangeness before there was fighting. There was magic—not the supernatural kind, but that feeling of not knowing what’s waiting around the next corner.

These Japanese t-shirts exist now with Puff puff! on them, referencing those early episodes. You can only really want one if you remember what it felt like then, before the series settled into being a formula. Before the mystery became routine.

I still think about Goku as he was at the start. Small. Not knowing what he was walking into. That version of him stayed with me way more than anything after. More than all the screaming that came later.