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Every manga artist hopes for a massive success that will cement their place in the industry, but that success can be a cage of their own. In 1983, Akira Toriyama wanted to work on a new manga, which would eventually become Dragon Ball. The problem? He already had the number one manga in Weekly Shonen Jump, and Shueisha didn’t want him to stop working on it.

Dr. Slump isn’t the household name that Dragon Ball is today, but in 1983, it was consistently the highest-ranking manga in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump. However, the comedy manga, which was largely episodic and didn’t feature any overarching plot, was difficult to write every week. As Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor working with Toriyama at the time, explains, the mangaka wanted desperately to move on to something new. “While Dr. Slump had started out very successfully, after six months or so Toriyama said he didn’t want to continue, that he wanted to stop. The reason was because each story of Dr. Slump was self-contained and finished every week; it was a comedy as well. This meant that if something didn’t work, Toriyama invariably had to change everything. So it was a heavy burden.”

The problem was that Shueisha saw Dr. Slump as a profitable project, so they weren’t keen to let Akira Toriyama work on something else. “Naturally, we weren’t able to stop Dr. Slump as it was a top-ranking manga in Weekly Jump and Shueisha would want to keep that going. I mean, the manga would regularly sell 1 million copies and the anime adaptation was going to start on TV. So we had to continue.”

Torishima had to serve as negotiator between Akira Toriyama and Shueisha. “However, I spoke to the chief editor at Weekly Jump about all this. His response was that if we could come up with something more interesting and successful than Dr. Slump, then sure. Do that instead.”

The difficulty came from the intense schedule at which manga is often produced. Torishima explains that they had to take the seven-day work schedule it took to make a chapter of Dr. Slump and condense it down to five. That would give them two days a week to work on this new project, which would eventually become the one-off story of Dragon Boy. This was reworked, with elements from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West worked in, as Dragon Ball. After Shueisha signed off on the new manga, Akira Toriyama was able to wind down Dr. Slump and focus on Dragon Ball, which would eventually define not only his career but the entire shonen manga genre for decades to come.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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