The Magic Before the Muscle
The first two manga I ever owned were volumes one and two of Dragon Ball, bought at a flea market for almost nothing. I didn’t know anything about it going in—just picked them up on instinct, walked home, and by that evening I was completely gone. Son Goku, the monkey-tailed kid with the power pole. Bulma and her Dragon Radar. Seven balls scattered across the world that could summon a dragon capable of granting any wish. It felt like something had cracked open.
What I remember most about that early Dragon Ball—before the Saiyans arrived and the whole thing collapsed into a tournament of screaming men comparing power levels—is the strangeness of it. Dark caves and enchanted castles. Villains who were ridiculous more than menacing. A humor that was slightly dirty in the way only a manga aimed at kids but drawn by an adult can be. Which brings us to "puff puff," Bulma’s running bit: offering someone a puff puff, implying something soft and chest-adjacent, then deploying her fists instead. It’s a stupid gag. It is also completely correct.
A Japanese label called Zatuon put out T-shirts built around exactly that joke—the phrase "Puff puff!" across the chest, insider energy intact. The kind of thing that works as a small social test: either the person next to you on the train gets it immediately and you’ve found each other, or they don’t and you’ve found that out too. The series ran for years past the point where it should have stopped, and I checked out somewhere around the Cell saga when I realized I no longer cared who was stronger than whom. But those first volumes? Those were genuinely mine.