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If you want to understand the big anime of today, you have to go back a few decades. While the West has long been a hotbed for shonen anime that have been influenced by Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, it is only one category that manga often fall into. Another is seinen manga, which includes iconic works like Berserk, Vinland Saga, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. For seinen anime, their “Dragon Ball” is an ultraviolent, apocalyptic journey called Fist of the North Star.

While it might not have the same pop culture penetration, Fist of the North Star can be seen as a contemporary of Dragon Ball in almost every regard. Both debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump and followed a hero as he battled increasingly powerful and outlandish enemies. While Goku battled enemies from other worlds while flying through the sky, Kenshiro was slightly more grounded in that he used pressure points to destroy his opponents from within while wandering a Mad Max-inspired hellscape that was the result of a nuclear war.

We said it was slightly more grounded, okay?

What is remarkable about these two shows isn’t just that they debuted within a year of each other – Fist of the North Star predates Dragon Ball by around 14 months – in the same magazine. What I find fascinating is how both laid the groundwork for two of the most dominant categories of manga today. Both were considered shonen manga at the time, which is the title for series that are aimed at young boys in Japan. However, it was Dragon Ball that changed shonen manga forever.

Watching anime in the '90s and '00s was an exercise in spotting the Dragon Ball influence in shows. Training arcs, transformations, and a protagonist seeking a higher form of power were rampant. Bleach, One Piece, and Naruto, the so-called “Big Three” of manga in the 00s, all take different aspects from Dragon Ball and make them their own. Even shows like My Hero Academia, which seek other influences like Western comics, aren’t free from Dragon Ball’s grip on the industry that began in the 80s and never really relented. You simply don’t have the same shonen anime landscape without Akira Toriyama and Dragon Ball.

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

Despite being from the same era and publication, Fist of the North Star’s influence can’t be seen quite as readily in shonen manga. You need to turn to seinen manga, which is defined by being marketed at a slightly older male audience, to see where it changed everything. The most obvious is JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. The first arc of that manga, Phantom Blood, features a Jonathan Joestar who is a posher and more polite Kenshiro. His physique and clothes are both clearly influenced by Fist of the North Star’s Kenshiro. Hamon, which was the main power in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure before Stands made their first appearance in Stardust Crusaders, is remarkably similar to Kenshiro’s Hokuto Shinken style of martial arts, which makes opponents explode by striking pressure points.

JoJo’s eventually shifted away from the more blatant Fist of the North Star references, but other manga would continue to be influenced by Buroson and Tetsuo Hara’s iconic work. Berserk creator Kentaro Miura has cited Fist of the North Star as the work that had the biggest impact on him, which also featured a lone, taciturn fighter wandering the world seeking revenge. Makoto Yukimura, who created the seinen manga Vinland Saga, was influenced by Fist of the North Star when he conceived his own series.

Fist of the North Star was a series that pushed the limit of what could be considered a “shonen” series, bringing mature themes and more graphic violence to the category. Without it, you probably don’t get shows like Chainsaw Man, which revels in the gore that was merely hinted at in Fist of the North Star. Attack on Titan doesn’t get to chomp through half its cast without Kenshiro making dudes’ heads explode back in the 80s. Claymore takes the moral ambiguity of Fist of the North Star and puts it into a dark fantasy setting. All these manga can trace their roots, in part, to Fist of the North Star despite being lumped into the shonen category.

The late '80s very much laid the foundation for the modern anime industry; Ranma ½ and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure debuted in 1987, while Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball were still running. Toriyama’s Dragon Ball continues to be the shonen prototype, but Fist of the North Star’s influence is still being felt today – just for a slightly more grown-up audience.

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