ドラゴンボーイ

DRAGON BOY

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
Not Available
RELEASE
September 22, 1983
CHAPTERS
2

DESCRIPTION

Dragon Boy is a manga by Akira Toriyama that ran originally in the Fresh Jump. It was later released in Akira Toriyama's Manga Theater Vol. 2. Dragon Boy is best known for being a prototype for the much more popular Dragon Ball manga, which began the following year.

Dragon Boy features the adventures of a boy named Tangtong and an unlikely ragtag group who go on a journey to the Flower Country. This short work is 45-page long (15 for the first chapter and 21 for the second), and it combines the comedic style of Toriyama's successful Dr. Slump series with a more action-oriented plot and pays homage to famous martial art actor Jackie Chan. Toriyama noted that his goal for the series was to tell an "unconventional and contradictory" story. Like Dragon Ball, this manga is mainly based on the Chinese story Journey to the West. Several elements from the story were later reused in Dragon Ball, largely in the first 13 chapters, notably the martial arts theme and the general atmosphere. Dragon Boy even has its own version of the Dragon Ball artifacts. However, in this incarnation, the Dragon Balls produce small dragons when hit with an energy blast, which actually was quite useless when Tangtong summoned it in the story.

(Source: Dragon Ball Wiki)

CAST

Tanton

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO DRAGON BOY

MANGA ActionDragon Ball

Cover Art for Toriyama Akira Marusaku Gekijou

MANGA ActionToriyama Akira Marusaku Gekijou

Cover Art for Toriyama Akira Mankanzenseki

MANGA ActionToriyama Akira Mankanzenseki

REVIEWS

neuki
70/100
Toriyama's early adventure.
The Title of the manga gives the idea that it is related to Toriyama's all time classic series and.. that couldn't be more accurate since it is very much a Dragon Ball prototype story,
here we get to see many of the ideas expressed and not expressed in the og manga, it has a pretty similar vibe to early dragon Ball, specially in aesthetic and humour.

This was created in early 1980s, after Toriyama had already archive significant success with his comedy gag manga dr. slump, when dr slump was nearing it's conclusion, toriyama sought to explore new creative ideas, his editor actually encouraged him to write manga with marshall arts theme since Toriyama was a massive fan of kung fu action films, this endeavour led to creation of dragon boy and eventually the dragon Ball mangas.

i will try to compare this to the original dragon Ball from here.

Plot:
the Story follows Tanton, a boy who grew up in a isolated mountain far from civilization, he is pretty clueless about everything, wether it's outside world, society or women, yeah he is very much a Son Goku prototype, Tangton is given a task by his master go-roshi-sama (a early prototype for master roshi) to return the Princess of war torn Flower kingdom to her home country since the war has ended..

Thus begins their great adventure in this ancient chinese inspired sci-fi mystical world.

Characters:
tanton is a Goku prototype that looks like a miniature bruce lee, he is a monster boy who can grow dragon wings and fly with it,
yeah he's a ‘dragon boy’ literally,
but he seems to not like showing his wings to other people (atleast to the princess) maybe cuz of his trauma that his parents abandoned him for those wings or maybe I'm reading to much into it, he is clueless about everything.

Go-roshi-sama the master of tanton, and a father figure to him, he shares parallel's with both roshi and grandpa gohan since he is the one that raised and trained tan ton in the mountains, he travels around in a nimbus like flying cloud, he also gives the protagonist a rather useless Dragon ball (how did he turn this minor gag into major plot point in his next series?).

There's also Puar (well he's not actually puar) a shape shiting demon, who joins the gang in their adventure, he may have gone to the same shapeshifting school as olong and puar, yk the one we never heard about again in the series.

The princess character is shown to be selfish, arrogant, full of herself, she's basically bulma of the story, her and tanton's duo was quite funny, she doesn't seem to mind being naked in front of tanton, probably because of her arrogance, she was actually very fun character..

i wish there was more to this than just 2 chapters..
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