Early Dragon Ball

Found the first Dragon Ball volumes at a flea market when I was maybe ten, and I read them until the pages started falling apart. Kept coming back to the same panels, the absurdity of it, the way Toriyama drew everything—the monsters, the gadgets, Bulma’s everything. I wanted to live inside those pages.

When the anime came out, it was like confirmation of something I already knew. But the early episodes—the ones that were still about adventure, treasure hunts, the sheer weirdness of a kid on a flying cloud—those were the ones that mattered. The humor landed. The world felt genuinely strange and worth exploring. Once it became about increasingly buff men yelling at each other in desert wastelands while their hair changed colors, I checked out. Years of screaming and powering up, each transformation bigger and louder than the last. I don’t care how many new forms there are if there’s nowhere interesting to go.

There’s more in Dragon Ball than people give it credit for. I watched this video essay once—some Wisecrack thing—about the philosophy buried in the series, the religious undercurrents Toriyama wove in without making it obvious. Made me think about what the series could have been if it had stayed curious instead of just… muscular.

Part of me still hopes Toriyama circles back. Not a reboot or a retcon. Just a return to when Dragon Ball was about discovery and wonder, not domination. Adventures where the stakes were a girl in a ball gown and a wish from a magic rock, not the fate of multiple universes. Weird and horny and smart, the way it started.