Manga!!

If you have never read any of the Dragonball or Dragonball Z manga (or for that matter, any manga at all) then I strongly recommend it. They are great!! They are (believe it or not) so much more cute than the series, plus, you get to see all the stuff that happens in Dragonball if you have not yet seen any of the episodes.  On the Back of one of the volumes I have (no 5 of DBZ I think), it says that "the animation style is much less blocky than the anime version".  I know we all have that thing where we usually have to defend the anime to other "non DBZ fans" (freaks) who say that the animation is crap...but there is no chance they can say the with the manga because the drawings and the pictures are so much smoother and more detailed (not to mention cute as HFIL!!).  The humor is so innocent at times but it really makes you laugh, often more do than the series.

All the pics in the manga are black and white ('cos they are drawn in black ink...duh) but like I said, they are still very detailed and so lovely to just look at).  The story is much more fast paced than the anime, you know how sometimes one storyline can drag on and on and on with out much happening (*cough* Namek saga).  When CN UK showed its first Dragonball Z marathon, last September I think, I remember after I had stayed faithfully glued to my TV screen for nearly 9 hours, recording every episode and taking out the adverts and that annoying DBZ marathon thing with that fat guy in a make shift gi (who by the way had the Kame senin symbol on the wrong side of his shirt!), I realized that the whole saga I had just recorded was contained in just 4 books in the manga!! I was a bit gutted (but still glad to get the episodes on video at last).  

There are 42 books with the manga (which I'll admit is a HFIL of a lot, specially at 10-12 quid at a time), but that covers Dragonball and Dragonball Z.  DBZ starts on vol.17.  Not all of them have been published, in English anyway...and if they have not in the original back to format format. Did I mention that? You can get the manga in its original format.  Eastern languages (and Hebrew, but don't worry about that).  It's a bit weird at first  getting used to reading the book from back to front and reading the pages from right to left, but after a bit you don't even notice it.  I bought the first volume of No Need For Tenchi (Tenchi Muyo) which is flipped so that it reads the right way around for the west, and it was actually weird reading manga the wrong was around...which is really the right way around, If you can understand what I mean.  Usually, because western languages read from left to right, when Japanese manga is translated the pages are flipped.  The trouble with this is that Japanese symbols (among other things) are the wrong way around.  At least with the original "back to front" books the art is seen as it was intended to be seen when it was originally drawn.

All the art work and story is done by Akira Toriyama (genius) so there is none of the kind of stuff you see on the TV when a character looks different in one episode than they did in the one before.  Like the series however, there are both censored and uncensored versions of the manga, and it is sometimes difficult to tell when you are buying it to tell if it has been censored or not.  Some of the books I have have "recommended  for ages 13 and up" on the front cover.  I assume that these are the uncensored versions and those without have been tempered with for the benefit of out fragile western eyes and minds, although some of the volumes without this age limit on the cover contain some bad language (usually courtesy of Vegeta).  I'm not a big user of the 'B' word (honest to Kame) but Vegeta and Didoria for two seem very fond of it.  It did really crack me up though when Piccolo called Raditz an "ass"...he he, I would love to see that in the series!!

As you can probably guess by the "13 and up" thing,  it wouldn't bee too smart to give a copy to a child, some of the scenes and humor can be quite adult.  Bare butts and bare other things are often common (but in the cutest possible way-unless its Bulma flashing her butt...) but I don't think you see much of this in the censored versions.  Still, its not like its page 3 material or anything, in fact, it's usually very funny.  Some of the Humor is much more adult than it is in the anime (mainly with master Roshi and pretty girls) and "romance" magazines usually pop up on the possession of Master Roshi or Dr. Briefs.  Other stuff like Bulma's Mother offering the young Goku "shake" and Bulma going mad about her serving alcohol to children is another example of things which may be considered more funny by adults and young adults other than children.  At the beginning of the Namek Saga when Bulma was walking around the ship in her underwear a lot was censored so that she was wearing shorts (my brother was quite gutted about that), however, no such censoring takes place in these volumes, so you see Bulma's underwear a lot in this particular volume (my brother was quite chuffed about that).  There are other pages with Chibi Goku taking a bath (Bulma's orders) but you don't see anything (unlike when he goes swimming or returns to his normal state after transforming into his Oozaru form).  Funnily enough, you don't see anything like this with Gohan in the DBZ volumes.  You also see a lot of things which FUNimation cut from the dub like in the Saiya-jin Saga when the Siba Men (or "cultivators") are destroyed (If you are a blood and guts person you will love that bit).  I was also glad to see a scene at the end of the Saiya-jin saga which I had read about but never seen because it was cut from the dub when the team fly of to one of the scenes of the battle to collect the bodies of Tien and Yamcha and then the 2 coffins on the air ship.

When I first bought the manga, I was worried that the fight scenes would be a disappointment.  The fight scenes in the anime are usually some of the best scenes in the show and usually with the best animation.  But just like the TV show, the fights in the manga are beautifully drawn and full of suspense. Movement and speed is beautifully drawn and isn't at all messy as you would expect it to be.

As well as the original storyline, you get pages with extra drawings and the original covers used when the story first appeared in Shoen Jump magazine...uh, for example, there is one page in DB with a pic of Master Roshi playing football with a dragonball, that sort of thing.  Another thing I had to get used to with the manga was using the original names for the characters, Kururin, Mutten Roshi, Burrma, that sort of thing.  I know a lot of people use these names anyway, but I always tend to use the translations, dunno why, and other little things, Krillen...sorry, Kururin calls Roshi "The Invincible Old Master" an awful lot, Goku just calls him "The Turtle Guy" and "O'l Timer".  Another thing you will pick up on is that the original names for the dragonballs are used  a lot "eg. Sushinchu = 4 star DB).

At first I was a bit reluctant to hand over my money for the books because I figured I knew everything that had happened because I had either seen the program or read about the episodes on the internet.  But I was really surprised as to how sometimes the story can be totally different to what you see on the TV, but so recognizable as Dragonball.